


Pharmakon

by kollapsar



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Aftercare, Bathtub Sex, Catching a Serious Case of Unwanted Feelings, Drug Withdrawal, Enthusiastic Consent, Follows MSQ and all the spoilers that entail it, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Magical Healing Cock Subverted, Patch 2.5: Before The Fall Spoilers, Raubahn is kind of whipped WoL kind of has no idea what the hell he's doing, Rough Sex, Secret Relationship, Size Kink, Sparring, There are two WoLs, WoL grows up through a Traumatic Conga Line of Events, eventual angst, wound care gets out of hand
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-11-13 06:38:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11179146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kollapsar/pseuds/kollapsar
Summary: A collection of sequential, related short stories accounting for the events of the MSQ.Atlin Tarn is a reckless mess runaway Miqo'te for a Warrior of Light- one who thinks a single night with the Flame General in his inn room could be good fun and the end of it. Should be the end of it.Definitely is not the end of it.





	1. remedy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ariaofthewinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariaofthewinds/gifts).



> Added note: This started out as a oneshot and every chapter installment is a more or less episodic piece that doesn't directly flow from the last work, but make more sense altogether. So that's why the format is... well, what it is.  
> Fellow Warrior of Light Allegrezza Kravitz belongs to the wonderful AriaoftheWinds, who happened to be overwhelmingly encouraging in the conception of this entire... thing, whatever it is. Enjoy, nerd. Thank you for being such a hardcore cool enabler of my massive (hah) size kink.  
> On an added note, I am literally only about _as_ far as the refugee, Syndicate-being-dicks situation in the MSQ. Don't breathe a word to me about how this may end for my poor shit son Atlin.  
>  Also- Atlin Tarn is not his real name, he's a Miqo'te ninja, somewhat-voluntary exile, and overall an irresponsible catnip-smoking shithead who's probably only alive because his friend Allegrezza hasn't allowed him to die of stupid yet. There, we're ready to roll to the good stuff.  
> Enjoy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Atlin Tarn is a reckless mess runaway Miqo'te for a Warrior of Light that makes the ill-judged choice of sneaking away from his friends to tussle with rebels on a night in the middle of Ul'dah's refugee conflict. Bloody and beaten, he runs into the Flame General on his way back, and Raubahn decides this dumbass needs to get patched up.  
> Being the reckless mess that he is, of course, Atlin won't settle for just wound care if he's got the Flame General of all people in his room.

یک بوسه زتو خواستم و سش دادى.

شاگرد كه بودى، كه چنين استادى؟

خوبى و كرم چه نگو بنيادى،

اى دنيا را تو هزار بار آزادى.

I asked for one kiss, yet you gave me six.

Whose student were you, to have become such a master at this?

You are a source so full of goodness and kindness,

that you’ve set the world free a thousand times more.

— 

| 

Jalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi  
  
---|---  
  
He didn’t estimate how hellishly long the walk back to Momodi’s would be with a single working eye and a debatable number of bruised ribs. But it’s long. And punctuated at every step with his own curses muttered under his breath, and stopped only by the hanging red sign telling him he’s at least halfway there: the Immortal Flames headquarters are just to the left.

The hall seems like a ghost of itself, with the darkness sweeping it with black and gray and blue. The crew of sentries on shift dot the pillars- a skeleton crew if anything, but ramrod-straight and alert. And there- Raubahn stands out like a sore thumb among them, wrapped up in the Ul'dah firelight. It’s not doing any favors for the look of deep worry tightening the scars across his face. Atlin could laugh. He could, at least, if he didn’t know why Raubahn was frowning.

At first he doesn’t even seem to notice him. In spite of himself, a swell of pride grows in his chest. Even with his ribs whimpering complaint to him and one eye doing very little by way of the entire seeing business, he can still move quietly enough to sneak up on the Flame General himself. His stomach may not be as much of a team player but he can make this work, get a bit of amusement for his night to see the general’s face when-

“No good sneaking up on a man like me, Atlin,” Raubahn grunts, turning in the shadow of the pillar to face him. The highlander visibly stiffens upon laying eye on him.

Well, the jig’s up. “Ah, I tried.” He laughs softly and strolls to close the distance until he can see Raubahn’s shiny, so shiny armor dancing and gleaming and spinning in his vision. “How long did you know I was here?” Damn. He can feel the rough timbre of his voice scraping around along his throat, and by the look on Raubahn’s face, it’s audible, too.

“Since I stepped out of the hall, my friend. Not many deign to walk the streets now- not many of the well-meaning sort especially.” He pauses, purses his lips. “I’ve enough questions and comments, but first: you shouldn’t be out here.”

“Is the general to escort me to my inn like a damsel?” That didn’t come out as sardonically as it could have. He squints a bit, leaning up against the wall as he regards the highlander. “I can’t remember beating Ultima Weapon but for a few flashes because I was stoned out of my mind, but who’s alive today?”

Raubahn barely shifts, clearing his throat and looking away. Pretending to search the streets for strangers, threats.

Oh, that pushy line of discomfort they’re dancing on once again. Atlin’s felt it in meetings, negotiations, operations: the  _ look  _ Raubahn gets the second he pushes him, nags him a little too long. It’d be satisfying if it wasn’t also so vaguely threatening- or maybe the threat makes him do it even more.

He likes to think they’ve been dancing on the line for a year and a half now, because he’d still felt chills the first time he’d heard the general’s voice. “Look,” he says, shoving off the wall and slowly prying his mask off of his face to hook it on his belt. No- vision in the right eye is still crap. He does his darndest to look well past the… well, there probably is a  _ lot  _ of blood on his face if it’s ran over his eye like this. He can feel it crusting over his right brow. “Fine. Walk with me. But I’ve already seen what the streets have in mind for me. And Grez is going to drag me through all seven hells if she sees, too. And I…” he smiles helplessly. “Well, I could use friendly chat.”

Raubahn makes a noise that sounds well enough like concession, and says, “You’re a fool, Atlin Tarn. Stay close to me.”

He can’t say his step is quite like a giddy skip when he follows, because a Warrior of Light would obviously never stoop to such a thing, and his ribs would scream at him anyroad- but he’s fair excited to follow. This is new, this… escorting. “I think in a way I’m used to always being beside a hulking tall tower of power now,” he remarks. “It feels safe.”

Raubahn’s lips quirk a little, though he looks like he’s trying not to show it. Too stern, this one, Atlin thinks. Needs a session with the pipe more often. “Allegrezza’s not every man’s idea of safe, way she flings a fire about. And neither am I. But what exactly happened to you?”

He looks up to the stars burning across the sky above the minarets and moonlit roofs. “Thought I’d take the shadows to further our little investigation.” He coughs, ignores the sting that crawls up his chest from it. “Gathered a lot of good info on the habitations of rebels, if you want to know. Taverns are crawling with them.” He wipes away the excess blood over his face while Raubahn is looking away to search the streets, so maybe he won’t catch another concerned look.

“I’ll arrange a party to look to it first thing in the morn.”

“Excellent.” He chirps- or does as well as he can with blood on his face. His boots thump along in rhythm to Raubahn, keeping pace in silence until he’s annoyed enough with the quiet to speak again. “I’ve had something on my mind since we got here.”

He makes a ‘hm’ noise. “Which is?” He’s feigning lightness well as he can with a voice that runs like mortar.

“The refugee situation, largely,” Atlin says, before adding softly, “my personal thoughts, not official ones.”

Raubahn doesn’t look pleased with the topic but keeps walking. “Watch your words.”

He laughs. Of course. No trust for the shadows of every end of street. Even in a fogged mind Atlin can count every good hiding place along the boulevard stretching ahead. “Grez is fretting herself senseless over your Syndicate’s decision, and it’s even beginning to worry  _ me.  _ Grez and I were basically in the same sort of situation as the Doman when we came here, and you know it.”

“Suppose the seven hells are rising if  _ you’re  _ worried. Isn’t that your friend’s job?”

Atlin bristles, feels his tail flicker with the same indignation. “Don’t.”

“...Forgive me.” Raubahn softens, a strange drawnness pulling across his brow. “The world writes roles for you now with your fame. I should know better.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t even expecting an apology, honestly- though he’s surprised enough he even reacted. He must be too sober if he’s bothered by the idea of Raubahn finding him careless.

Raubahn stops, and if takes Atlin a moment to realize why: they’re at the Ruby Roads exchange. Only up the path is Pearl lane and a ways to Raubahn’s quarters in the palace, but just to the side of them now, the hubbub of drunken bar songs blusters on behind the doors of Momodi’s inn.

“Well, thank you, my good general…” he pauses, suddenly, unsure of his own words. The world and its individual tenuous storms and boundaries don’t stop dancing and wavering just because Atlin’s not sure where to go next. There’s the door, wavering in his swirling vision too bright in the shadow, and there’s Raubahn, close enough to count the scales of his armor.

He can see some kind of decision flicker in the general’s face. A sternness. “I’m not leaving you to treat your wounds alone, Atlin, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

He laughs in spite of himself, surprised. Someone like Raubahn should just… well, go home to his royal quarters and lay eyes on Atlin next only in court, only at official business, only as it’s always been.

They’ve never been alone together before. “You make it sound like I’m some… Fine, fine-” Even before he’s finished the man’s broad hand is wrapped his arm and steering him through the doors. He feels his face warm with the blast of noise and turgid tavern air. It must be the air.

It’s half a dance weaving through the early hour drunkards, but Raubahn takes to it like a plow and clears through the bodies to the stairs in seconds. “I see why you’re a general,” Atlin comments dryly as they move on up, swallowing his indecision as the stairs spin in his vision, and stomach. The hubbub behind is already growing quieter, to but a murmur punctuated by the man’s heavy footfall. He moves like a general, too, Atlin supposes. Someone you hear when they enter a room, the way he almost reflexively isn’t.

“I wouldn’t treat a soldier like this,” Raubahn grunts, crossing his arms patiently as Atlin fiddles with the key to his room. “You’re a Warrior of Light, my friend. Dread that you and all your work get felled by a paltry infection.”

He snorts a little. The man’s got his tail swishing with an amusement he can hardly contain, brushing minutely to the side against Raubahn’s boots and armor as he works the door.

They stumble- well,  _ he  _ stumbles in, fumbling with a match to light the lamps on the desk before they do too much tripping in the dark. Raubahn takes the empty, orange-illuminated space in somberly. “It’s hardly changed in over a year.” Snapping his head to Atlin, he asks, much firmer, “Do you have a medical kit?”

He pauses, gestures faintly to the shelf of the desk while biting down a giggle. Being babied by concerned older parties is one thing- he’s had enough of Grez worrying about him to feel guilty for a lifetime- but the  _ general  _ …

“Where have you been hit?” He’s already rummaging through the box, all business, almost absentmindedly ushering Atlin to a chair. _ Doesn’t treat soldiers like this, my ass,  _ he thinks, grinning awkwardly to himself. “Other than your brow, anyhow.”

“It was a fistfight, more,” he says, “ribs, so on, Raubahn. I’m fine. The cut was just my mask.”

“’Tis what you get for an open shirt called armor.” The man’s muttering without even listening, like he already knows Atlin would lie about where he’d been hit. Decisively he places a rag, potion and wound dressings across the desk, working so quickly it’d be worrying if he were anybody else.

“Listen, my armor is-” he’s interrupted by a cold rag soaked in potion to his brow, and flutters with a blink as Raubahn wipes away the crust, peering in closer to examine it with a squint of focus. Atlin exhales disjointedly with the wash of burning across his brow, reaches up to grip the strap of the man’s armor for want of something else to focus on.

“That sting?”

He blinks, testing the vision in his eye and finding that face come to slow focus before him. “No,” he lies. “I just… I’m high.”

“That, I just assumed,” he says, almost wearily. “Well, seems as though you have vision. Show me your ribs.”

He laughs weakly and hopes his cheeks don’t look as warm as they feel. Is this happening? Even though Raubahn by all measures probably isn’t even  _ thinking  _ of it, well,  _ he  _ can’t help but to when the massive Hyur is all but towering over him inches from his face. “You really don’t…”

Raubahn’s glowering could send the most pious to cower in shame. And Atlin is only feeling his face grow hotter. He needs more drink for this. “Here… Get the sash for my pauldron while I…” he trails off, feels the man step behind him and work, slowly, to undo the knot of his sash, unraveling that layer of armor. It takes a lot of mustered focus to unbutton his front and loosen the belts of his gear, and he goes slowly as he can even when Raubahn’s long done with his sash, eases the shirt off with a wince and looks away.

He knows he’s scarred. Raubahn can likely see it like a language of violence written all across his bare back. He’s been thrown around, cut into and pummeled too much for there not to be ridges when he reaches there. “Any bruises- ah!” he hisses, ears whipping up when he feels rough fingers press to the ribs at his side.

“One.” A pause, fingers patting along his skin further. “At least.”

“Damn.” He half-chuckles, half-whimpers, holding up his arms so the man can get a better job done. “You were right.”

“I hoped not to be.”

“Two,” he cringes. “Three. They don’t feel broken, do they?”

“No. You’re lucky-” he says, applying pressure so cursorily Atlin only feels it in stabs.

“You’ve done this before,” he observes, breathlessly, working to regulate in pace to Raubahn’s examination. Can’t avoid the pain, after all- he may as well meditate on just how  _ rough  _ that skin is against his, focus on the pressure and warmth of Raubahn’s palms until it’s over.

And it is over. He’s almost surprised when those hands draw away- they lingered, he thinks, perhaps if only for a moment- and Raubahn steps back to the desk. “A potion and rest seems all you need.” His voice is low, devoid of all that previous sternness. But he’s not looking Atlin in the eye as he’s working open a potion.

Atlin slides out of the chair too quickly for the Hyur to shove him back into it. “Gods, this would go better with a drink,” he grumbles, reaching in to snatch the potion from his hands and down it. They never tastes quite… right, always tingles on the way down and settles something strange in his belly. He gasps as he finishes it, wiping his mouth and giving Raubahn a pained smile. He must look a disaster now- even more than usual, at least. Maybe it’s the sobriety, but he’s keenly aware of how the man’s looking at him like he’s something that could break. “Thank you,” he says. “Since that banquet, it seems like this’ll be second time you’ve had to carry me to bed in a helpless state.” He steps in, inclining his head and feeling, just slightly, the brush of that gladiator armor against his bare chest.

Raubahn doesn’t step back, like he probably should, only stays staring down at the mess of bruises Atlin knows he is, eyes widening a little in confusion. “But I haven’t carried you.”

Well, fuck it. Atlin kisses him. Atlin may have to take a fistful of armor and put a damn leg on the chair to do it but he does, and Raubahn’s scars feel exactly as he expected on his lips. Grooves punctuating the softness of flesh. Warmer than he expected, but just as stern- he inhales sharply, poised precariously between the man and the chair and every possibility of a lifetime of awkward court conventions, stiffening-

It takes a lot not to make a noise when Raubahn leans down, almost unbalancing him, hands wrapping quick enough about his hips to catch him.

His hands are so broad they could cusp around his waist and Raubahn kisses back slow and firm until Atlin closes his eyes and can’t help the purr rising in his aching chest as that grip on his hips tightens, pulling him in until he’s flat against him, leather digging against his skin.

Shit.

He gasps when they part and just knows, knows he’s wearing a dazed, shit-eating grin on his face, because Raubahn look exasperated already. “Well then. How long have you wanted me to do that?” he asks. “Were you just going to wait until I did it, or…?”

The man responds with a roll of the eyes, leaning down and scooping him up from his legs and back- now  _ really  _ like some damsel- and unceremoniously carrying him to the bed and dumping him on it.

Atlin laughs almost hysterically. “Listen, now that I know, you’re not just going to put me to bed and-”

But Raubahn climbs on over him and sends him breathlessly back down against the bed with a single open palm- Atlin catches just a bit of the red on the man’s dark skin before he’s pushed into a longer, deeper kiss.

He groans- Raubahn’s mouth tastes like desert flower tea and it’s so hot and forceful he can’t almost feel the drool escaping his mouth as they kiss, wrestle almost to match, like they’re pushing the breath out of each other until they can both be gasping. He’s only too aware of how his body is tightening up, his legs at each side of the man’s body bucking and bunching the sheets around them.

He can’t stand this. With a soft moan, he twists to wiggle beneath his weight and shoves a hand toward the man’s belt, fumbling along the leather of his pteruges blindly, desperately.

He knows he’s done right when he feels Raubahn stop and stiffen momentarily over him, and grins, stroking up under that leather to feel that mass, take it in his hand and twitches just under his palm.

Hells, Atlin thinks, breathless. He’s huge. He feels Raubahn’s rough breath against his chest as the man draws back, props over him and stares down with- Atlin doesn’t know what that look could be called, but with his lips parted like that and his eyes darkening, he knows he wants to bring it out of him even more.

“You’re not going to tell me how long you’ve wanted me to do this?” he gasps, giving him an experimental squeeze. Raubahn looks a little helpless- if that’s because of where his hand is or not, Atlin can’t tell. “Because I can tell you when I did.”

He chuckles, unexpectedly, though it’s so heavy with arousal it’s almost a growl- Atlin can feel his own pants tightening uncomfortably around his hips in response. “You’re going to try to push the words out of me, aren’t you?”

“Since the banquet?” he grins, reaching to work Raubahn’s belt free, tearing it away to clatter with the rest of the armor on the floor. Smallclothes- forget them. Atlin shoves his hand directly under and feels the flesh of the general’s length against his naked palm. “You know, I thought, during the party, before I passed out- maybe I’d stay after. When it was just darkness. Because you fascinated me, and I wanted to know- if I’d find you and let met you hold me down over a table and-” he strokes him and can feel him stiffen even as Raubahn bites his lips over him- “and take me with this.”

“You thought no such thing,” he growls, giving a quick- almost reflexive- thrust through his palm.

It’s surprising. It sends it prodding against his belly, sends a chill down his body as he feels out just how large the man truly  _ is.  _ He can hardly get his hand around him, and it’s… he exhales.

“Maybe I didn’t then, all right,” he admits. “But I did think about it a hell of a lot of times after.”

Raubahn shifts over him, almost completely encompassing his body with his own. “You’ve pleasured yourself to the thought of me, Atlin?”

“Have you to me?”

“I never presumed to think it could come to this.” He smiles and it’s almost alarming how sweet it is. “So yes.”

He could giggle, if his ribs didn’t protest the very thought of giggling. “Then I have too.” He licks his palm, slowly, keeping his eye to Raubahn as he brings it down to rub along his head, circling it with his thumb to smear the precum all across the dark length of his shaft.

That seems to be all it takes. With a guttural, almost frustrated grunt, the general takes Atlin by his shoulders and flips him over so quickly he almost yelps, taking his hips and tugging them up until he can feel his erection sliding across the insides of his thighs through his trousers. He bites at his lip, grinning as he feels those hands work his pants down, baring his skin to the humid air, exposing him from the waist down to be seen.

“There’s oil in the-”

“I know,” Raubahn says, moving behind him to twist to the desk by the bed. “You’re not very subtle, keeping your oils in your wound kit.” There’s a clatter over his own laughter into the pillow, and he suppresses a purr of anticipation as Raubahn returns, hands gliding over his bare thighs. He’s a mess, pants half off at his knees, yet- he shamelessly thrusts his hips up and grips the pillow as he feels the oil drip down over his sensitive opening.

There’s a pause. What’s he waiting for? He hisses impatiently, twisting to look over his shoulder to that tower of a man-  _ gods,  _ and his cock could be the size of Atlin’s arm. It’s fully erect now, stiffly twitching over his lower back, so hot he can feel it against the sensitive base of his tail.

“Are you-” Raubahn starts, gently, “are you sure?”

Atlin could yowl twenty curses, but, well- with the desperate neediness of his own cock dripping a trail of precum warm down his inner thigh to mesh with the oil, words are difficult. He settles for the first thought in his clouded, desperate mind: “Fuck me.” He hisses it, grinning dangerously as he reaches back to stroke him, wiggle his ass ever closer against the stiffness of the man. “Please. Gods. Raubahn.”

“I-” Raubahn trails off- Atlin is about to well and  _ truly  _ start cursing, then, this was a mistake and Raubahn is about to withdraw and now those courtrooms are  _ truly  _ going to be a nightmare and-

His train of thought derails when he feels the head of it nudge up against him. “I’m going to, then. I just-”

“Don’t want to hurt me?” he gasps. “Gods. Please. Just, I’ve, please-” the word  _ please  _ quickly deteriorates to a stupid, carnal mewl pushed out from the deep of his throat as he feels himself suddenly stretched open, so quickly it stings,  _ burns.  _ Oh gods- this is just the head. He whines, shivering with the effort to keep still, twitching as he feels him slowly sink deeper, stretch him wider and wider until that burn has climbed inside him.

Gods, he’s so big. Atlin bites back another moan as the man pauses. That’s just- that’s barely past the head of him. “I’m going to-” Raubahn sounds ragged. “Are you-”

“Just,” he babbles, “fuck, just do it. Raubahn.  _ Please,  _ I want you to.” Shit, he’s slurring, but he can feel the pulse of Raubahn’s cock like a strong steady hot heartbeat inside him and he needs, needs more.

He expected it, but he still gasps as he feels that cock begin to thrust further inside him. He whines, wiggles to move his hips up to meet him, feels himself stuck in place by the man’s hands fixed firm around his hips, controlling every inch that enters him, turns him out slowly, fills him where he didn’t know he could be filled. “O-oh…” he softly stammers, “that’s…”

He comes back to himself to the sound of his own noises, lips parted across the pillow mindlessly as Raubahn drives in so slowly, deeply, it wholly  _ aches  _ a blooming pleasure inside him, but gods, oh gods, it is so good. “You’re-” Raubahn is grunting, “I never dreamed, that is so good, you’re…”

He answers with a long, controlled exhale. He can’t think. It- it honestly feels like something in him will be ruined forever; Raubahn is stretching him so much more with every second, every measured slide inside him, he almost feels like something’s snapped in his body, his chest, his head,  _ somewhere. _

He’s whimpering half gibberish that stops with a sharp, high noise when he feels the bones of the man’s hips sharp against his ass, and then his hands flex around his hips, holding him perfectly still when he’s otherwise a twitching, squirming mess. Raubahn pulls back ever so gently, tugging along every part of him, and Atlin feels a hot pulse jolt like lightning through him when the ridged head of that cock brushes him there,  _ there, and- _

He sobs, softly, feeling the hot ribbons of his cum spray over the sheets and his legs, mouth open and dragged across the sheets to mute the downright pathetic noises he feels wracking his body _ .  _ He shudders, hard, trying to buck his hips in spite of that hard grip, thrust into something, anything, while the heat blinds him, makes him clench  _ hard  _ around him until he can just about feel Raubahn’s hard, strong heartbeat in his cock inside him.

“Just-” Raubahn’s voice cracks through the haze in his brain, “from me putting it in you?” he sounds… awed. Husky.

He groans, feeling that length and those hands fixing him there, ass in the air and propped up on his length. With him fully pulled up against his hips, his knees are dangling inches away from the bed, leaving him to hang forward over the pillows, held there in his hands.

He looks over his shoulder, feeling the sweat and tears roll a mess over his cheeks as he stutters, “M-more.”

“I… Atlin,” He pulls out, draws so slowly Atlin can feel himself emptied bit by bit until just the head sits tight, holding him open. “You’re too much for yourself, Atlin. You…” he breathes, “you might be too much for me.”

He grins dazedly. “E’tahlin,” he rasps. “My real name is E’tahlin Tia.”

Raubahn nods, lips parted as he mouths the name. Tastes it.

“Raubahn,” he whispers. He won’t have words much longer. “Please... More.”

He obeys. And Atlin doesn’t think anything could have prepared him for it when he well and truly begins fucking him.

He bucks almost instantly, helplessly- he can’t even move right now, not with Raubahn picking him up, only dangle, just moan as the Hyur pistons quicker and quicker, until Atlin finds himself moaning stupidly with his mouth trailing a pool of drool streaking across the sheets.

That vulgar tempo of their bodies snapping, skin to skin, speeds to the point that he’s not even sure if he can take it anymore. Past the whimpered  _ Yes, yes  _ noises, he can’t find a single word to say right now, he’s so lost in the sound of Raubahn’s breath and its ragged crescendo paced to the penetrating searing wonderful pain burning through him.

There’s a hard staccato grunt, abrupt in the rhythm, and Raubahn draws back almost entirely- then  _ slams  _ into him so full he feels sank in to the hilt around him. He cries out, surprised, as the man drops him, leans over and presses him flat to the bed, hand snaking beneath him to wrap around his own cock, stroking him in rhythm to the thrusts until he can feel his eyes roll back, helplessly rolling his hips and making every obscene noise he knows. It’s too much- with Raubahn inside him, cramming into him, and his hands around him, he feels his body contract and the pleasure consume his thoughts.

He shudders all through the orgasm, held still under him- it’s painfully hot, it’s him ground straight into the sheets, Raubahn rolling his hips and digging deep into him from where he’s pinning him. “E’tahlin…” Fuck, his name sounds so good in that voice, and Raubahn sounds so  _ gone.  _ “I’m-”

“Please,” he begs- or thinks he does, he’s half incoherent, “Please, gods-”

The man tenses up over him, arm hooking around him suddenly as he releases a ragged noise- and Atlin feels the hot burning girth of him flex inside him and spurt into him, filling him so deep he feels  _ wrecked,  _ whining as Raubahn gives several more slow, firm thrusts, feels it froth inside him and push even deeper.

He almost doesn’t notice that they’ve stopped, comes to with the sound of Raubahn’s panting hot in his ear, the rough texture of his skin and the armor he’s still wearing digging against his back as he lays on his side behind him. He faintly registers how he can feel him still inside him, a dull and comforting ache keeping him full, unable to move, drifting and half conscious in his own sweat and drool and tears.

When Raubahn finally rouses, gently moves away and slide out of him, Atlin feels the trickle of his cum roll between his legs from where he lays. The Hyur takes his shoulder, gently turns him over and looks down to him with concern. “Are you all right?”

Atlin knows there are tracks of tears on his face, that the corner of his mouth and cheeks are moist with drool. But in a ragged daze, he grins. “I’m incredible,” he rasps. “ _ You’re  _ incredible.”

Raubahn looks uncertain, still, until it’s all Atlin can do to strain forward, gripping his arm for support as he kisses him. They’re a tangle of half-dressed sweat and seed, and he can only grin to think of it with that pleasant, deep ache inside of him when he draws away, pleased to find him more relaxed- close, even, to smiling. “Momodi’s going to kill me for what we’ve done to her sheets.”

Half-inches from his face he can see the Hyur’s cheeks burn dark red. “I’ll send over an missive in the morning with gil and-”

“No,” he laughs, dropping back into the bed and trailing his palm over the tattoos and muscle of Raubahn’s arm, tracing along the contours lazily. “No, you won’t, general. People will talk.” He shifts, moving to leave the bed, and winces as the cramp stabs through his body all at once- ah. Damn. Now that he isn’t in the heat of the moment, the consequences are sinking in all at once. “Could you…” he bites his lip, sitting up and gesturing faintly to the washbasin and cloth across the room. “Please.”

Raubahn looks confused for a moment, then, eyes widening with realization, almost  _ dashes  _ across to fetch the basin, trying to compose himself all the way there and back. He pauses, looking almost despairing as he towers over Atlin then, like the Miqo’te’s body is some sort of crime scene he’s left behind. “Will you let me?” he asks. “It’s the least I can do… after hurting you like this.”

He grins tiredly. This kind of chivalry should have been expected with a man with a heart like the general’s, yet… “Sure.” As slowly as he can, he stands, slipping his trousers and boots away as he presents himself to the man, entirely bare then.

The Hyur bites his lip, setting the basin to the bed and moving to fetch a chair, dragging up just before Atlin and settling so that he may look up to him. He proceeds with the washcloth carefully, running up first across Atlin’s chest, then working slowly downward to pat him clean across the lower belly, groin. “I don’t care if there’s talk,” he says, softly, as he rinses the cloth out.

“What,” Atlin shifts a bit, biting his lip to conceal his wince. But a year and half ago he wasn’t sleeping off his high in a nice room in this city, but in the streets. “I can bed a general of Ul'dah now just because I’m Titan’s Bane? Your city and its Syndicate are too uppity yet for that.”

Raubahn looks disheartened enough, but nods, drawing his body in ever closer until he’s taken a deep breath nuzzling to Atlin’s breast, hand still working across his body with the rag to clean him. He exhales, feels the calluses sweep across him and the water roll down his back, Raubahn’s fingers sweeping gently to clean across his opening. In spite of himself, he twitches with a lazy sort of arousal, and smiles sheepishly for it, though the man seems not even to mind. He’s fixated forward, as if even this close to him he’s seeing right through him.

He sighs, leaning in, holding Raubahn closer. “I’m sorry. But I could die. You could die. I can’t be where you are and you can’t be around me always. Or even most of the time.”

The Hyur’s sigh warms across his chest as the cloth falls away and Raubahn tugs him close, wrapping his arms all around him. “That’s a mature decision,” he says, voice muffled against his skin, “for the supposedly reckless half of the two Heroes of Light. You’re young yet to think like that, E’tahlin Tia.”

He shudders to hear his birth name again on his mouth. It sounds private, sacred even. “I can be reckless if I have no one to hurt.”

There’s a derisive chuckle. “If I’m not yours, you can’t lose me, is that it?” he asks, drawing away to fix Atlin with a gaze so intense it almost hurts.

He wavers, looks away sheepishly. It does sound selfish when he puts it that way. It burns even to know the man is looking to him like that, honestly, even expecting differently of him. “In every world and instance I’d come away happier for just having lain with you, Raubahn,” he says. “No possible presumption I’m good enough for more, should try to be.”

Raubahn makes an exasperated noise and gets up, leaving him with no answer while he strips away the sheets from the bed. He moves around Atlin in neat sweeps, heading to the closets so quickly he almost doesn’t realize what he’s doing.

“You’re not changing my sheets,” he protests, laughing shakily. How weak that sounds. It’s not as if he can hop after the man and stop him. “You’re the Flame General, and you’re not-”

He silenced by the sweep of fresh linens descending around him, tightening up until Raubahn has him all but swaddled. The world tips over as he’s suddenly lowered back to bed, the softness pressing around him to the point that he sags into it, feeling the pain aureating from all those many places of his body.

The man’s about to draw away when he squirms out of the blankets just enough to catch his hand. “No, hold on,” he pleads. “Stay with me?”

He stills. For a moment he thinks he might go- that’d be the sensible choice. “You’re the one who says this would be unrealistic. Unwise.” That’s the stiffer, authoritative voice Atlin hears across training yards, the Hall of Immortal Flames, the sultana’s court- not the ragged draw of his birth name across his tongue.

“I know.” He drops his hand, frowns up to him. “I wish it wasn’t. But I’m not supposed to be the wise one, anyroad. Please.”

Raubahn should leave, he really should. But he heaves a sigh, eyes softening as he gazes back to him and turns. Unwise, Atlin thinks to himself with a dull pang, and a smile. The man lets himself get tugged back into bed, lets Atlin work away the knots of his armor until he can snuggle in and bury his face in Raubahn’s chest. And Atlin in turn feels broad arms wrap around him, and closes his eyes knowing they’ll stay there to the sunrise.

*

“What in the seven hells _ happened  _ to you?”

He feels his shoulders sag- the hope had been, more or less, that he’d get through his breakfast and have a smoke before having to face Allegrezza’s wrath, but fate hasn’t decreed he’d be so lucky. And Momodi had been so sympathetic having his food delivered over to his table instead of making him limp around for it.

But the mage has instead arrived early to the tavern commons, Alphinaud in tow. Atlin chews as long as he can to delay an explanation, knowing full well that Allegrezza’s stare is burning holes through the cut in his brow and the bruises showing through the dip of his shirt. Maybe he can somehow also delay standing up and walking. He’s not quite a fan of that much either at the moment; it’s a cramping sort of pain that likes to scream up and down his body, as if he’s supposed to regret it or something. “I was stupid last night,” he says, too quickly, like ripping off wound dressing. “I went out.”

The consternation melded with exasperated, sisterly concern on Allegrezza’s face is intense enough for both her and Alphinaud- who only provides a far milder look of surprise. Atlin grins sheepishly, unconsciously holding his own ribs. He doesn’t feel quite intent on sharing the encounter- it doesn’t make a good story, he supposes, or an amusing enough one- but he  _ definitely  _ can’t give it in front of Alphie.

“Atlin, you know that’s stupid,” she says, gently enough to make him feel sufficiently guilty.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. Fistfight, mask hit my forehead. Rebels and their little gleanings from the Pugilist guild, you know?”

“You’re hiding a limp,” Alphinaud says mildly. “I saw you in the hall earlier, Atlin.”

The little shit.

“I’m fine,” he says before Allegrezza can react, drawing to stand demonstratively.

Oh hells, he isn’t. Breathlessly, he swipes a hand to the table for support, resisting the urge to sit down immediately after.

The Roegadyn heaves a  _ long  _ sigh, though her bright eyes are softened enough now that he knows the consternation is slowly being outweighed by pity. “Here,” she says, “at least let me give you a hand. We need to be getting to the Royal Promenade.”

He blinks. “What for?”

“We have an audience with the sultana and general.”

Ah, yes. Right. An audience. With the sultana. And the general. That will be interesting.

He mouths a thank you to her, letting her lean down and sweep an arm around his back, fixing a hand around his sash to hold him up (while he shoots Alphinaud a particularly dirty look).

They move slowly through the Ul’dahn sunlight and markets. The heat’s coming down in waves then, blooming over his skin in warm sweeps that he could positively soak up. He can almost forget that his body is screaming. “Did you at least find anything of interest?” she asks, eventually, watchfully checking the streets for rabble-rousers and rebels.

“Oh, yes, some really interesting findings,” he says. “Apparently they’ve shite taste in taverns.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

She heaves a sigh, massaging her temples with her free hand. “If you think I won’t be telling the court about this brash presence of dissenters running about the city public, you’re sorely mistaken, Atlin. They  _ brutalized  _ you.”

He bites his lip and looks away so she won’t see his face, and does his very best to tune into focusing on walking over everything else. At some point Allegrezza and Alphinaud exchange words- it’s something on about how the rebels are sheer counterproductive brutes, horrible, really, what they’re doing to the political state of this city, look what they’ve  _ done  _ to Atlin, he’s  _ limping. _

Like he can exactly come to the brutes’ defense on this one by telling her just why they’re not the culprits of that.

Hours and a very significant amount of almost frantic pipe-puffing later, he’s back at the inn, alone and thoroughly drained. He’s sat through a long, extravagantly thorough committee of how those rebels can be so  _ bold  _ as to so wound a Warrior of Light-  _ look at him, he’s limping  _ was said enough times that he could count the very subtle way Raubahn just started sinking a little deeper into his chair in quiet mortification every time the phrase left Alphinaud or Grez’s mouth.

They’d avoided locking eyes all through it. It seemed the best choice, best not for him to look to the man and remember the night, the feeling of his body or him inside him- when his entire body is suddenly being admitted to evidence before the court, an erection is not quite what he’d like the sultana to take into account.

But there’d been a point- just a quick one. He glanced across the table of the court between the appeals, and found his gaze meeting Raubahn’s- who looked only straight ahead, at first, and then- gently enough, smiled. He returned it, nodding- almost overwhelmed by a kittenish flutter in his chest then. And then he looked away. Their hands brushed as they left the congregation, and Atlin hadn’t looked back as he and Allegrezza and Alphinaud headed to return to the inn, plan their next steps.

It’d been a minute repartee, so small that when they turned back to the world, the world had still gone on- unknowing of those stark, singular moments.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know what foreplay is. But I wanted my fantasy sex, so... //shrugs?//  
> Hope you enjoyed. Sorry it was a little hastily written- if I missed anything, let me know, but over all, just let me know what you thought :) You can also find me on tumblr as http://kollapsar.tumblr.com if you wanna yell at me there. I'll probably yell back. Or just reply like a civilized person. Godspeed.


	2. a breath between it all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raubahn worries about everything Atlin is hiding from the world when they hide away together- takes what little the Miqo'te is able to give as they slowly settle into the strange terms of their relationship. Atlin decides it's storytime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when this was a oneshot? Final Fantasy XIV called and said I had plot material to fuck with. I'm not sorry.  
> Did my best to research Miqo'te culture. Took liberties anyway with the authorly handwave that customs vary from tribe to tribe.  
> Also, TW for a briefish mention of child abuse. Starts at "Atlin sees his face and gives a shrug. “It was here and there." ends at "A man beating the defenseless". And there's a quick reference to Raubahn and Ilberd having been a thing way, way back when.

He’s only ever seen Atlin Tarn cry when they’ve made love: tears of pain and pleasure tracking his face, and even then the Miqo’te smiles on fiercely as ever- begs him to fuck him more, harder, just as pitilessly.

It bothers him, Raubahn decides. That he should know the Scion so little in his swirling world of inconsistencies and unknowns that he can’t really think of anything that could even possibly provoke him. Elevate him.

Hurt him.

“How will I know if I do something that hurts you?” Raubahn asks one day, because he’s not a man to dance outside the point or employ wordplay where questions will do. He gets enough of that as is- and loves that Atlin’s almost always of the same mind.

The Miqo’te is perched precariously on the window of his quarters, sloppily half-dressed, a sheen of sweat glistening on his olive skin as he moves to tamp the leaf deep to his pipe.

He likes this, Raubahn decides. This point after they’re done where he can drag out the post-coital glow on the heat of Ul’dah’s sun and his pipe, basking and conversing and occasionally- every so often- beckoning he come closer. Come enjoy the view. Atlin’s told him he doesn’t appreciate the view he has of the city as much as he should, like the Steps of Nald are some long choker of diamonds to behold in the midday sun.

“I don’t know if you could hurt me,” Atlin replies, neutral enough that it almost sounds like an insult. Raubahn feels himself almost pre-emptively bite down frustration- mystery is almost a damnable regularity in the courts and his daily work nowadays, but in Atlin it’s close to hurtful.

The Miqo’te takes a long, deep drag of his pipe, the smoke screen choking the air between them momentarily, until it isn’t, and he find Atlin looking to him with a lazy, intent smile. Like he’s something to see in the mess of sheets in his bed, half draped over all the paperwork they’re _supposed_ to be doing. “Well,” the young Scion says, “what could I do to hurt _you?”_

He pauses, chewing on the question. Harm or disobey the sultana, he thinks. Destroy the firmly set ranks and order he’s beaten into the tiers of the Flames. Give up on himself. Give up on Raubahn.

It can go on. It really can.

He can die.

“You certainly can’t hurt me with your fists,” he ends up saying. “Those paws could barely tap me.” It’s a cop-out and they both know it- a badly negotiated end they’ll wrap off and leave to address later, or never. Suppose he likes the possibility of being able to speak to Atlin and leave things behind with him in tow; nothing else in Ul’dah ever ceases to follow him. Suppose he learns to like it because the thought of chasing the Miqo’te with anything deeper- and his subsequent rebuff- is like a stab in the ribs.

Atlin laughs, reddening with the jibe. Raubahn feels a swell in his chest that he can do that to him- small, he knows, but a rare look on the youth. “Listen. I’ve been training,” he shoots back, grinning enough to look like he’s posing a challenge. And Raubahn has to be reminded over and over, by the gashes and tracks of angry red and purple on the Hero of Light’s body, that he truly has been training.

Atlin smiles easily enough- he smiles for just about anything, really, if let to zone out enough. But Raubahn feels a crawl of something intimately disturbing to feel that he only really is _genuine_ in those sweeping moments they share making love, a desperate blink of earnesty before he’s lost to this game of jibes and smoke.

He doesn’t want to be bothered that he’s never seen the Miqo’te cry in earnest emotion. ‘Tis not as if he’s done so for him; his frustrations are concise when he shares them, because in all entirety there’s so little either of them can really _do._ But he’s reached over in moments where they’ve laid together half-asleep and moved the hair from Atlin’s eyes and wondered if any of this was- well- real. All Atlin has ever been has been bundles of neutrality and smiles, a drive to the next pipe, and an inexplicable connection to Allegrezza Kravitz that sends them from one bloody encounter to the next. (Is it really so inexplicable? Raubahn asks himself. He feels the same sort of connection to the very sultana when he dares to think of it.)

Raubahn watches the Miqo’te smoke leisurely beneath those sunbeams, the smoke curling down around his body before dissipating in that heavy humid air.

At some point Atlin asks him what he’s looking at- his ass or his face. Raubahn shrugs him off by admitting to both, though he thinks, wonders, if this is truly all there is to E’tahlin Tia. A figure draped in his window, a smoke screen, a grin, a jape, a track of tears when they lay together punctuated by desperate, desperate begging for more and more.

It disturbs him.

They walk a certain, practiced distance apart on the Strip on the way to the hall, and the sunset is practically burning the red in Atlin’s hair past the glistening of his visor. They have to remind each other, there’s things they know between themselves as only lovers could; he’s told Atlin of Ala Mhigo, of his family, his home now faded to some distant dreams cast in Ul’dah’s glaring bright realities. They’ve spoken of war, of battles where they’d both felt perhaps it’d be their last.

And Atlin has told him his name- a name he still whispers to him when they’re close, if only to feel him shudder to the sound and sensation of his breath in his ear, to arch his back and remind Raubahn that he _knows_ him.

But the Miqo’te’s seems largely uninterested in recalling his clan, their life and commune on the hills outside La Noscea. Which is why Raubahn is surprised and carefully curious when, as they walk, Atlin says, “When I was coming short past my kitling years, there was a _Nunh_ -” he pauses, glancing to him and then away. “A, uh- a mating male. He’d come in and killed the last one in a fight after challenging him, so after the victory he was Nunh next.”

He frowns. He’s heard of the Sunseeker Miqo’te practices within their secluded, hermetic little clans across La Noscea and Ul’dah, but Atlin relates it as most Eorzeans would relate a birthday party or some other inconsequential event. It’s not what he imagined for a clan that had fostered someone like Atlin Tarn. “Is it required that the former Nunh die?” he asks.

“My mother told me no. But I’ve never seen one spared.” He shrugs. Raubahn’s always envied and disliked his indifference to his family- the inexplicable sort of uninterested emptiness with which Atlin relates any little fact of them seems to resound as shallowness in the Miqo’te’s personality, no matter how much he doubts it. “The Nunh he slayed was the one that sired me.”

“Oh.” He inhales sharply. If they were anywhere away from Ul’dah’s vigilant eyes he’d draw him in then, touch him somehow if only to feel his shoulders and see if he was tense- sometimes the only real indicator of anything in the young Scion. But he can’t.

“Aye,” he laughs dimly. “I only figured that out a month later. An older aunt had come heckling my mother’s hut, fussing her, the lot, you know- as family does.” Raubahn does know. It’s a vivid picture to see: Atlin as a kitling by some shack hearth, listening as these two older Miqo’te women huddled, trading secrets much the way he remembers his own mother and aunts would. “I’d been put to the side to work- my mother did the baskets, so she saw that I could too, see, before I was to hunt- so the ladies just talked, and then my mother told my aunt that she was with child again.”

Raubahn raises an eyebrow, watching his face for any trace of indication. “By the new…?”

He nods. His visor hides his eyes- some implement of his training, Raubahn doesn’t doubt, or maybe something as shallow as a concealment of intoxication. It’s hard to tell. “Aye, the new Nunh had sired this one. And then my aunt asked if my mother thought, well, if it’d be a boy or a girl. And- if it was a boy, did my mother think he could be stronger than me? Have my eyes?”

“Your eyes?”

“Lucky different eyes.” He snorts. “They're auspicious, I hear. They wanted a boy with the new Nunh’s strength and my eyes.”

His chest feels an unexpected twinge. Why is he telling him this, now, when there’s a measured distance between them, when eyes in the crowd follow their every step and his every reaction to Atlin’s word?

Atlin glances back, seems to see the face he _must_ be making, and laughs, quickly waving his hands. “No, no. People asked that of each other all the time. The entire point of a Nunh is that he ought to be the strongest and sire the best stock.”

He wants to ask if he believes in that, but bites his tongue. Enough scrapes with the diverse people of Ul’dah have taught him to touch delicately on those questions if at all. “Well,” he clears his throat, determined not to pass judgement, “was the new child a male?”

“Aye.” He smiles. “My brother. E’rakhesh. It was fair to him but the whole clan expected entirely too much before he’d even been born- some hero of fortune and strength, you see. He’d been the first child of this new Nunh, you see. A few others were with child but he was to be the first, the… uh,” he gestures a little, helplessly. “An indicator.” He stops, tail flicking as he looks up to him, nods his head to those vast pillars framing the Hall. “Well, we’re here.”

He could tear at his braids in frustration if he had any more energy from the court of the morning and their time together before. Of course it would be Atlin to leave off his story there- perfectly timed beneath the signs, with personnel reverently moving about them with eyes half-cast to their spaces. “Why did you tell me this?” he asks, even as he catches eye with Ilberd and Allegrezza Kravitz further in, by the doors.

Atlin turns to follow his eyes, waves to them clumsily before approaching in a jaunty stride. “Oh,” he says, turning to glance over his shoulder, “it just seemed like a thing we could talk about instead of business, I suppose.”

It’s a concerted effort not to think on this revelation as they proceed through the meeting’s agenda- to the point that he feels the meld of annoyance and curiosity grating away at his attention. He runs almost on some distant force of habit, exchanging scrolls, paperwork. As usual, Tataru and Allegrezza have done and long readied much of the Scions’ end; Ilberd talks supplies and morale and Raubahn can all but feel Atlin staring through him past the neutral facade of his visor.

They’ve talked about Ilberd. He sees no point in hiding a truth that’s had years to fade into an inconsequential detail, especially when Atlin’s asked. Truly- from all their words and all Raubahn can do, as far as Ilberd goes Atlin can only truly negotiate his quiet contention alone.

By the end of it all the other Hyur proposes they go for a pint, wash away the difficult business of the day. Allegrezza Kravitz tactfully smiles- just exerted enough to mean well, just tight enough to convey some mysterious distance- and declines, citing other obligations. No surprise there- Atlin partakes enough for the both of them by and large and it’s emblazoned in their dual reputations. But then Atlin excuses himself as well, parroting something similar to his friend’s excuse and departing with an amiable enough- if absentminded- wave of the hand.

He doesn’t try to think beyond the initial confusion. His day’s far from over- there are reports he must make to the sultana, units to supervise, and Ilberd. He tries to ameliorate the annoyance, reason to himself, think: beside occasionally being inexplicable by virtue of personality or intoxication, Atlin may not be as complicated as he’s determined to make him out to be.

“He’s a bit young, don’t you think?” Ilberd comments suddenly, jolting him out of his thoughts to the point that his chest almost feels a skip. “It can be easy to forget that in the light of all their achievements.”

Rauban coughs, working covertly as two tall Hyurs can to move them out of the confines of the crowded hall reception chambers. Even a tavern would be better if they’re to dance on a dangerous topic like Atlin Tarn. “Allegrezza is no novice in her own right,” he says, affecting nonchalance as he leads them away to the desolation of the open streets.

“Raubahn,” his friend chuckles, “there’s hardly a need to- oh.” He pauses, expression quickly shifting from mirth to alarm. “Oh. Shite, I’m sorry. I just assumed it was common knowledge.”

He feels his teeth grit a little in chagrin; so much for secrecy with a man who’s known him for as long as Ilberd has. But if anyone must know beside Nanamo Ul’namo or Pipin, he could do far worse than his friend. “Have you spoken to others?”

“No, no.” The other man walks closer then, speaking softly, “So, you and he aren’t going to…?”

They’re alone for several paces in a street with the winds blowing away a sound, but Raubahn can’t help but feel a tension twist in his throat to think on the question. It’s unsettling, if only for how closely Atlin’s guarded the fact of their time together. “The world has other matters to tend to in times like these, my friend,” he says, smiling as best he can. “It’s not the… best choice of attention.”

“Well, neither were we,” Ilberd chuckles, “but I suppose you weren’t such a celebrated figure back then, not some champion of Ul’dah. And he… well.” He turns his head and looks to him, not unsympathetically. “Your heroism has put a yoke to you both, you know.”

He tries to scoff it off. “And I suppose a _lowly_ captain of the glorious Crystal Braves has so fewer precautions to take.”

“With who I lay with?” he grins. “Absolutely. But besides you the one time, I’ve no penchant for scooping up heroes in dangerous political interstices.”

“Are you to keep reminding me?” he asks, giving him a practiced, warning smile. Much as he may not mean to, Ilberd pressing at well-hidden truths in the broad light of day is testing his patience. “Or can we drink some damned ale and catch up on all we’ve been doing all these years?”

Ilberd snickers gamely, guiding them to the tavern steps. “We’ll see if I can manage both, my friend.”

As the duties of the day spiral to a silence and solitude, he grows to accept Atlin won’t visit. Paper and reports by candlelight are hardly his favorite part of his schedule, but the Miqo’te has been making a habit of surreptitious late visits since they’d began… well, whatever they had.

It’s often been to make love- sometimes even right there over the desk, hands gripping its stolid edges- yet just as savory is the talk after. It’s the time they steal from everything else to spend on a night or two between the many weeks.

But Atlin doesn’t come that night. Raubahn finds himself catching the silver moon setting and sighs, moving to put out his candle and retire to bed. He’s tired enough to shake off the worry, even past the drifting questions in mind; there’s been enough in the day between exchanging japes with Ilberd and his pressing obligations.

Ilberd. The man had grown and fleshed out past the boy in his memories, and in the selfsame way over ale and talk of the years, of Ala Mhigo, he’d grown to almost wish Atlin did not dislike him so. The man made the occasional teasing comment over ale- just subtle enough that Raubahn could not stop him, a word here and there about the smell of herb sticking to clothes- but past that he’s much as Raubahn remembers: lustrous, driven, and determined as ever to make his mark on this chaotic world.

He can laugh still at the friendly jabs, but the sense of danger doesn’t crawl away, nor the paranoia at the thought of listening ears.

It’s only when Raubahn is all but fully slipped away to unconsciousness that the weight of a body settles over him, and the smoke pours away from Atlin’s shroud, demarcating his silhouetted figure above him.

“You’re late.” Groggily, he reaches to grip the Miqo’te’s waist, planting him to straddle his chest like he could disappear again in seconds. “I didn’t hear the door this time,” he says, blinking to focus on what little the moonlight deigns to show him of his lover.

“I’m getting better at this, then,” he whispers back, the grin apparent even in his voice. He shifts a bit so their hips meet just right to sidle against each other. Raubahn realizes he’s already done away with his sash and jacket and boots. “Or maybe you should be more careful. I doze off once and come late and you’re all undressed and vulnerable...”

He trails off, instead leaning down to lap a wet, hot stroke behind Raubahn’s ear- he stiffens, feels it run down his spine, and takes his neck to pull him closer, find his mouth and hold him there.

So much for sleep. He can feel himself rousing already in spite of it all; there’s little doubt either that Atlin has no intention of going to sleep without getting worn out, either, and he’s doing well to grind his crotch to Raubahn’s body as they kiss so he’ll end up much in the same spirit.

Impatiently he slips a finger beneath Atlin’s tail, his pants, finding his opening and gripping his body against his as he circles his finger against it. Atlin murmurs, then, a single shudder running along his body- the Miqo’te’s back arches, and Raubahn can hear him hiss sharply as his finger presses inside.

He almost doesn’t _have_ to do anything past that- with a clipped inhale Atlin sinks to meet him to the knuckle, slowly fucking himself on his finger, until he adds another just to hear him moan.

“You left off today,” Raubahn whispers, flexing inside him just enough to get his hips to buck and grind, desperate against his own stiffening shaft, “making me want to hear more about this clan, this family of yours.”

“You want,” he pants, clenching around him, “me to, ah, tell you now?” He laughs, though it’s broken by a moan. “You’ll have to earn that story now with more than your fingers.”

Even as he speaks, he shoves a hand beneath Raubahn’s loose trousers, stroking eagerly along him. He inhales with the pleasure, pressing back into the pillow and letting himself just feel those hands and accept for the millionth time that Atlin Tarn lays above him, that they know each other as they do.

Atlin squeezes him, warningly, just enough to bring him back to attention as the Miqo’te sidles even closer. He stops, then, undressing quickly and peeling away the last of his clothes above him, and Raubahn lets him.

It’s a blur of seconds later that he finds Atlin perched cross his thighs, working oil eagerly along his shaft- hot, pumping strokes that have him clenching his grip on the Miqo’te’s shoulder. The darkness is filled with their soft, matched panting- he can close his eyes and all but navigate the contours of him, every jutting edge of his hipbone when he drags him close, follow the path of every scar. He strokes his hand down Atlin’s belly, takes him in his palm, and gives him an experimental squeeze.

He rolls his hips, thrusting into Raubahn’s palm with a pleased gasp, reaches behind to nudge the head of his cock just up against the tight pucker of his opening. He rocks onto it- slowly, so focused and quiet Raubahn whispers, softly, “Breathe, E’tahlin.”

He does. And then he takes him.

Ah, gods, but then there’s _this_ again and he may need to take his own advice- Atlin’s efforts seems to undo them both in some kind of thorough process, slowly, slowly taking in more of him. Pressing up inside him takes his damned breath away; like a blow to the chest or a blinding flash of light. They settle over moments, ages, Raubahn stroking along the Miqo’te’s cock as he sets, fully feeling Raubahn inside him.

When they move it is only so slightly. Atlin’s biting back a soft gasp every time he ever so slightly rolls his hips against him, and it’s driving Raubahn to hold down every last urge just to thrust up inside him and drag that cry from his throat.

Gods, he’s _beautiful._

He stares at his flushed, parted lips and the haze of his eyes and feels a jolt of visceral wonder if, in that stillness, that held breath of a moment of connection, they live in today what could be the their last day tomorrow. And every day after.

And Atlin stares back, a dizzy little smile on his face as he appraises Raubahn. His tail curls in the air behind him at playful attention. “You look so good right now with your mouth open like that, General.”

Suddenly, without giving him time to reply, he moves: with the push of his hips he rolls up into Raubahn’s hand, slides upward, then back, gyrating in a slow circle rhythmic with their panting in the dark. He could curse with how good it feels- in fact, he does.

The Miqo’te releases a strangled cry when, abruptly, he thrusts up to meet him, disrupting the rhythm they’d set- and his surprise is strong enough for him to tighten around him to a strangle that brings a grunt rising past his lips.

He can’t bear this any longer- Atlin’s back is arched a perfect curve and he’s filling his ears with a hissing desperate “ _Yes_ , yes _please,_ ah fucking gods yes, _Raubahn_ -”

And he takes his hips and lifts him, then drives him down against his cock, cramming him a little fuller to hear him give that sharp yelp. Raubahn groans with the heat and the tightness, takes his small frame and turns him on his back instead, feeling his flushed body plaster against his as he presses him into the bed and muffles his soft cries with his own mouth.

He kisses back- all up until Raubahn begins fucking him again, and then he’s dismantled to that bundle of shudders and noises, digging his face up against the sinew of Raubahn’s neck and groaning a little harder with every thrust.

He feels that wetness then, the tears in between the needy, senseless begging- and then that burning heat of Atlin’s body _clenches_ around him, and that senseless begging turns to something else entirely. He slams inside him to the hilt and comes to the sound of his name over and over, so fervent and ragged that Atlin has all but made him into a prayer.

Even in the daze past that deafening pleasure slowly passing over him, this is in his bones: the turning to find him, the reach across the dark. He thumbs away the glistening tracks of tears and swallows the guilt building in his heart as he sweeps the hair from Atlin’s eyes, tries to make out the mismatched shades of them in the darkness. And he whispers, “Are you all right?”

The Miqo’te laughs, weakly, nuzzling against his hand before replying. “Of course.” He kisses along his palm before returning, “I’m all right. Are _you_ ?” His tone is markedly sardonic and he’s wearing _that_ smirk again, like he finds it funny that Raubahn asks every time, can’t help but to.

It’s a sort of attitude he’d blast a soldier for, but with this little bastard it’s disarming. “Aye,” he says, leaning in to kiss along the marks on Atlin’s cheekbones. He can taste the salt of him still. “More than.”

He cleans him because it feels like penance, taking the softest towels he has and sweeping away every dirty mark he’s left on him. The scars of Atlin’s body may be left by the world, but he’s tortured with regret to mark him, himself- in the limping, in the occasional accidental rings of bruises when he forgets himself and Atlin begs for more, more of it all.

He’s soft beneath him, pliant as he sweeps the seed from his belly, and he can make out the faint, sly grin tugging on his lips as he works. “You know,” Atlin starts as Raubahn turns away to rinse out the water, “it feels like you worship me when you touch me like that.”

“You’d enjoy thinking that, wouldn’t you?”

“A Warrior of Light one day, a Primal next. We’d make fine Primals,” he jests.

Raubahn scoffs. It’s difficult to explain just why it isn’t worship. Atlin and deep-seated guilt just… aren’t acquainted, he’s found. At least not apparently. He leaves the rag by the side of the bed with the basin, climbing in to lay beside the young Scion and wrap him in his arms until he’s fitted there perfectly, aureating warmth against his chest. Safe.

Atlin’s tail flicks a lazy sway, entwining along Raubahn’s bare thigh as he nestles against him. He could laugh- often enough, if the Miqo’te says nothing his tail can say it for him. “You can’t seduce me to sleep, Atlin Tarn,” he whispers, resting his chin along the tuft of his ear. “You owe me the rest of your story.”

“You made me forget. Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all, or even like he did forget. “I just never think to run about and tell people of my brother. Doesn’t come up among all the talk of the fate of Eorzea, Garleans, crystals, you know. Running away from monsters on fire.”

“Atlin,” he sighs. “If you don’t wish to tell me, you don’t need to.”

That gets him a laugh edged with a bit of nerve. “Sorry, sorry. I will.” He shifts, draping one arm across Raubahn and brushing fingertips down his spine. “Well. My brother, born to a rising moon. Would he have my auspicious eyes, his father’s might?” he affects a dramatic sort of whisper in saying it, like this is some apocryphal tale and not his family. “It was a hell of a lot of pressure to put on a kitling. I could hardly think of a baby the size of a Moogle going about killing a Nunh for the name, but then I was the one swaddling and bathing that would-be Nunh.”

“You sound…” he’s not sure if he wants to voice it. “You sound like you love him.”

“Well,” Atlin snorts a little, “because I do. And he never got my eyes, luckily.”

Raubahn wonders what this token quality must have meant to _him_ as a kitling. “You were close.”

The young Scion is quiet for a moment- Raubahn can almost visualize the way his face blanks to a distant expression when they tiptoe on something strange between them in conversation. Anything from his family to the future to- well, the two of them. “Well, he was a happy baby, you know the sort. Always crawling here or there, always excited to see me. His father would visit every other week, look to him, play with his future warrior. Gave him sticks like spears for toys.”

Raubahn gives a small noise of acknowledgment. “And you and this Nunh- do they treat the previous mating male’s children fairly?”

“Oh, in the end it’s all children, some just stronger and better fit. I mattered as much as the doormat, and it was well enough to me,” he laughs. “Listen, it was obvious early on I wasn’t Nunh stock, and made worse that I really didn’t give a dungheap about it. But E’rakhesh- that’s where we were focused now.”

He quiets the urge to ask more, lets Atlin speak. It’s the most he’s ever heard of any sort of past in the young Scion’s stories.

“Some point- when he was about four years on- we started realizing that he wasn’t…” he shifts again, propping himself up on his arm to look up to Raubahn. “Well, past a bit of hissing, you know, food words, ‘Ma’, calling me ‘Tah’, he wasn’t... learning like the other kitlings were.”

Raubahn nods, frowning as he strokes unconsciously across his body, back, waist, hips. “And that hadn’t been expected,” he says, steadily as he may, though Atlin’s words bring a slow chill to his spine to recall how similar children were treated in the streets where he’d been a boy.

“No,” he mutters. “Not quite. Despite what E’karnhe thought, beating the ways and wisdom of a Nunh into him wouldn’t change that.” His voice takes a hard edge- a glimpse of tension, derision. “E’rakhesh just learned to make himself small if he heard his father’s footsteps.”

He shakes his head in spite of himself. The aspects of punishment may work on an adult, even a youngling, with the right explanation, guidance- but a child?

Atlin sees his face and gives a shrug. “It was here and there. Slaps on the wrist with a knot of branch if E’rakhesh didn’t hold his training spear right. Kept him out in the training yards past dark, punishing him if he moved, if he didn’t show him the steps of the spear.” He looks away, eyes fixing some distant point along Raubahn’s quarters. “My mother thought it may help, that with our clan’s efforts, he’d catch back up to the rest of our kitlings.”

“I can’t see you thinking that would work, even at a tender age.”

“What, me think I know how to raise him against the word of his parents and the clan? It was my teeth or my opinion; I couldn’t have both. They weren’t doing this out of malice, they just…” he trails off. “It wasn’t pointless to them.”

“But you had to see it.”

“I just cleaned him when it was all done,” he says. “He’d be stuck out there so long I’d be wiping him down in the dark while he just shivered, scared to move and smelling of piss. I just wanted him to learn, pick up some of any of it, so maybe they’d be content enough to stop, but he just _hated_ it.”

“A man beating the defenseless is no man, even if he thinks it’s in good intent.” He feels the distaste for this stranger swell, almost unconsciously tightens his hands around Atlin’s body. “Did his father have other children?”

“Oh, aye, plenty as a Nunh does. E’rakhesh was just his first, and his stamp on our entire clan’s idea of him.” He gives a hard little laugh. “He did have others. And he left my brother alone, tried the rest of them to see if they could learn, and they did, and he stopped, and we all moved on,” he explains. “The clan rather just let E’rakhesh be. Taught him this or that- basketweaving, he’s a hell of a basket weaver. They let me and my mother care for him, put him to work- keep him out of E’karnhe’s sight.”

“And E’karnhe remains in your clan with your brother.” It’s almost uncomfortable to pry away at Atlin so freely- he feels that in any moment he’ll end the story again for as inexplicable a reason as he’s related it.

“No. I got a rare letter today.” He laughs harshly. ”A Tia challenged his position and killed him for it. They said it was quick and entirely expected for his age.” He pauses- Raubahn can see him frowning a little, like he’s wading through his own thoughts. “And they say E’rakhesh asks for me, that sometimes he leaves our mother’s hut when she doesn’t notice and wanders around freely now.” He exhales. “I’m glad he’s getting fresh air.”

Raubahn stirs; the jarring edges to unnerving when Atlin can share something like that- in that tone. “And now his father is dead, and they’re asking you to return.” He won’t ask if he will, if he wants to.

“And now he is, and now they are,” he echoes dimly, seeming to deflate a little from any previous sparks of resentment. “Well, E’rakhesh never wanted to remember his father unless he was right in front of him, you know, or something that reminded him was. He scrubbed away the memories of the training like an ugly stain and went on much as he could. It’s more satisfying to _me_ to know E’karnhe’s not around anymore.”

Bitterness, he thinks. Even mildly spoken of and shrouded in Atlin’s easy tones and almost disinterested storytelling. Raubahn knows well enough of that aching resentment to know it when he sees it- it’s painted across every memory he has of the faces at Ala Mhigo, the soldiers he’s walked among after Carteneau. It’s even been in the gentle sultana’s eyes when she’s looked from her palace to the hungry throngs of the city.

It’s been in his own moments in the Fragrant Chamber standing in the wake of another well-spun web of deceit.

It’s a familiar feeling- but it’s foreign to Atlin’s easy manner in every way Raubahn’s ever known. “Thank you,” he says, decisively, pressing in to kiss him, feeling him shift to turn in to his lips. They kiss slow- the sort of embrace rare between them, devoid of all the urgency of their sex.

Atlin draws away only moments after, and asks, “Well, you’re always welcome, but what are you thanking me for?”

“For sharing. I’d wondered for long what kind of world could make a person like you.” He says it because he knows no better way to say it. As if he could admit that he wanted to peel away at all that veneer of youthful recklessness, smoke and battledance and find something even more naked and real beyond it all.

How could that ever sound anything but damnably selfish?

Atlin laughs, a short, sharp sound. “A world that makes an addict? It’s just a story.”

“And Ala Mhigo is just a story. As it was, it’s just words in the mouths of survivors, and memories grow more difficult to piece together by the day.” Raubahn sighs. “Stories are of no small meaning.”

He gives a small ‘hm’, shrugs slightly. “You’re not wrong at all. Though you’re probably overestimating the impact of mine.” He rolls his fingers across his back, hums. “I almost feel bad for telling you. You’re tense.”

Raubahn shakes his head, running a hand through those mussed locks. “E’tahlin.”

He shifts attentively in his arms. “Yes?”

How does he put this to him? “You said you can’t lose what’s not yours.”

“… I did.” His voice is tinged with wariness- Raubahn can already feel him slowly drawing away, unconsciously making a distance between their bodies.

“Be at ease,” he says. “I’ll never ask it of you, then. I only meant to say- I’d be honored whatever the outcome.”

“I…” He sighs. “I… all right. That’s…” His voice may break. Raubahn can’t tell in its hoarseness- he thinks it may have. “There’s just bastards like Lolorito and Teledji and Il…” A long draw of breath, somewhere between exasperation and remorse. “I, ah… Thank you.” It’s hesitant, clumsy like he has no idea what to do with the confession. But it’s not unexpected.

He gets the sense that Atlin’s concerns sit closer to his heart than just the politics, the danger of Ul’dah and the plots of the Syndicate. But he doesn’t say it. Atlin Tarn can disappear just as quickly as he arrives. He doesn’t need to be driven away- the world pulls him.

“Raubahn?” His voice is uncertain, melding with the sighs of the wind between his balcony curtains.

“Yes.”

“I need a favor.”

He knits his brows, puzzled. “What of?”

“Well, you.” He pauses, seems to take a breath to steady himself and his words and leave Raubahn in suspense. “You, well, you should… you ought to concern yourself with the things that don’t have to leave tomorrow. Not this.”

And that is the closest, he thinks, that Atlin will usually ever get to expressing worry. But he doesn’t have to tell him to be concerned for this city. He doesn’t know any other way to be. “Concerns like Teledji Adeledji won’t leave so easily,” he agrees, “but they’re also not nearly as pretty.”

There’s a weak chuckle in the darkness- he can feel his hand find his, clasp it, small against his fingers. And it doesn’t leave, like Atlin’s seeking some way to apologize, or say _something_ without saying it. “You, thinking me pretty,” he says. “I’ll be using those words against you and you know it.”

“Think nothing of it. You preen so much already in your dyed armor and silken sashes, I wonder how you find time to battle,” he shoots back, and earns a weak knock across the chin for it.

Atlin is asleep not long after, but Raubahn finds himself unable to rest in spite of his own weariness. He lays there, watching the moonset steal away the last of the light casting silver across the youth’s back, turning over his thoughts. There’s enough yet to do, warriors to lead and investigations to further for the Garlean influence, Teledji- and never enough to shunt from the back of his sultana.

At some point, however, amid the meditations he thinks to when he last laid here only earlier today: Atlin smoking in the sun. Telling him he wasn’t sure if he could ever hurt him. Like the Miqo’te thought himself so detached and invincible.

ast what Atlin may say, he knows the Miqo’te can be hurt, can be angered and upset and set with a deep sense of bitterness, vengeance. He can love. Raubahn knows that truth of him, knows it from a story told in a space that belongs to only them.

And let that world have everything else; they both love its ugly bloody exhilarating spaces and people too much to give it any less.

He can wait. Let Hydaelyn take more of them both. But Atlin’s trust- this secret, strange, chaotic and clumsy process of their unraveling- this is an honor in its own right, and he means to keep it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ariaofthewinds: "You must have sex with me exactly 3 (three) times to unlock my tragic backstory."  
> Yes, Atlin's the kind of shithead that would panic and say "Thank you" if Raubahn ever told him outright that he loved him.  
> Let me know how you liked it. Not nearly as dorky as the first, but man, it only gets better from here. Fucking 2.55.


	3. a whisper's too much, a scream's not enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is in two parts and based on the events leading up to the finishing cutscenes of 2.55. 2.55 is next chapter. 8)  
> Enjoy.

1

Ilberd couldn’t have picked a more relaxed moment to ruin for him.

He’s sitting idly with a meal he’d carried down from the Seventh Heaven, entertaining himself with the toss of his daggers in clean arcs in the air in between forking bits of steak from the plate. He’s riding the high of his last fix brought in by his retainer, enjoying the relief it’s given for the pleasant ache of his body after a night with Raubahn, easily watching the lively chatter of the Scions by the main hall from his table by the corner.

“So good to see you returned safe from Ul’dah, Atlin,” the man says cheerily. He’d come in and talked to a few on his way through- Atlin had heard it, absentmindedly- but the assumption that his path would end in this little corner out of the way of bloody  _ everything  _ hadn’t quite occurred to the Miqo’te. “I’ve heard excellent things of the Heaven’s steak.”

He takes a seat across him and sits sideways, draping one elbow across the table and using his other hand to work to loosen the buckles of his Braves jacket, sighing dramatically like he’s had a day. Atlin doesn’t think he has. The hairs on his head remain practically untouched by a  _ breeze. _

There’s a maddening sort of composure in Ilberd, melded with the years he has on him, that sends his brain to an inexplicable place beyond jealousy. He’s wondered if it’s because the man seems so much closer to a fitting lover for Raubahn: composed, sober, older, experienced, and blessed with so many more years of friendship before love. “You took the long way back?”

“Oh, the  _ longest, _ ” he laughs, “Alphinaud will not hear the end of it from the reports if the complaints were anything to go by. But the men are better for the thoroughness in examining the Ivy’s doings. We can’t afford speed on such a matter.” He shakes his head, finishing the last buckle and letting his creamy white undershirt show through from under as he leans forward to him, smiles amiably.

Atlin wonders if, painfully, this man actually thinks to make  _ friends  _ with him. He spins his dagger in his hand and chews slowly, glad that the bulk of his disdain is concealed by his visor. “Good,” he says, neutrally. “So you’ve talked to Alphie?”

“I’m on my way in,” Ilberd says, tipping his head to the bar. “Do you want a drink?”

He suppresses the reflex of a frown, glances between him and the shelves just beyond the common area. “Sure.”

Moments later a glass of ale is gathering warmth off his hands as he finishes his plate, chews a slow rhythm as he watches the Hyur nurse his drink. “I have to admit something to you,” Ilberd says, hushed enough that Atlin realizes only they can really hear.

He stops playing the dagger across his fingers, sheathing it in a quick motion and sitting back to cross his arms. The man’s about killed his high. “What’s that?”

“Men with jobs like yours,” he says, “their lives are difficult enough. And there’s plenty of leaders in Eorzea who’d agree with you.” He leans forward then, slipping a scroll from the inside pocket of his officer’s coat to offer to him. “Open this alone. I’m not certain of its contents but ‘tis not a letter of such… widespread concerns.”

Atlin frowns to it, but takes it from his hands and tucks it to his own jacket. “You’re doing delivery for post now as well as Alphinaud’s command?”

The Hyur laughs like tinkling glass. “No, but perhaps for you if you asked.”

He doesn’t try to think what that means. Ilberd leaves soon after, relievingly enough, putting Atlin to sulk in the entirety of his sobriety before climbing to his own quarters above the Seventh Heaven.

His room is just as austere as any other in any other city, only marked with personality by his medicine kit and lockbox. Yda and Thancred had had some notion of namesigns on the doors as many of them settled in, but a flurry of reasoning and admonishment from everyone else around left the doors in the halls anonymous and signless.

He falls to his cot, about to sleep before he even remembers the scroll pressing into his left breast. What the hell could Ilberd possibly have to bring to him? He can only imagine the sort of illicit requests or suggestions- at best, it’d be a tip-off to an apothecary about Revenant’s Toll.

It’s none of it- on closer examination, the scroll is a tough parchment common in the royal correspondences he’s seen Allegrezza receives, sealed well with the stamp of the black scales of the Immortal Flames. A missive from the Flames? He raises an eyebrow. This was much more of Alphinaud or Grez’s territory, but he’d not complain if the one or two letters found their way to him.

He breaks the seal, flicking his tail curiously as he unfolds it in the light of the Aetheryte pouring blue into the windows behind him.

It’s short, for an official letter.

It starts by calling him E’tahlin.

*

_ E’tahlin, _

_ A correspondence with a captain of the Maelstrom revealed to me the presence of a clan of Miqo’te just west of Wineport. The sultana will be very pleased to bequeath a caravan of foodstuff and supplies to the E if they would receive it on account of their raising a Hero of Light. _

_ It shall be handled confidentially, of course, as men like us can boast enough enemies with a lust to claw away at our weakest parts. You know it well as I. _

_ You’re infamous for never writing back, but Ilberd saw the truth of us in but seconds, and when he suggested this I thought that if I could give you a single thing of me to have in all places you go it may as well be this. _

_ Pray, if you ever desire to, let him convey anything you wish to send. _

_ Raubahn Aldynn _

*

_ Raubahn, _

_ Sure I’ll receive any time now a letter by forty proud relatives begging I come home. But as long as you got my brother some decent clothes. _

_ I don’t write. I don’t write back. And I can’t wait to tell you what I think about you letting Ilberd know. _

_ I’ll probably be back in Ul’dah soon. _

There’s five scribbles for drafts crumpled by the deskside and an open book of words Grez lent him burning curves and loops into his brain and he still sighs with frustration to hold the sheet to Raubahn’s by comparison.

They’re both not the letter-writing type, he knows, but the general’s position has granted him over a decade of practice in this sort of royal buffoonery that makes his own work look like the clumsy shaky oversized loops of a child.

He contemplates burning the letter. Both of theirs. The oil lamp flickers with a little breeze that shudders in through the inn window, dancing like a temptation to be rid of it all.

In the end, he only burns his own clumsy attempts at writing, is pleased to see the grotesque imitation of words shrivel to ashes in flame. Raubahn’s, he folds, a single innocuous sheet he wraps so tightly he can fit it in a bottle next to all the poisons and potions in his medicine kit, cork it and let no one be the wiser.

He tells Ilberd the next day- when he asks, a quick moment snuck away from the rest- to simply tell Raubahn he received it. Ilberd tells him he doesn’t blame his being careful in times like these.

Prudent, he calls it. Keeps you both safe from prying eyes. I understand.

Atlin finds himself wishing the man knew nothing, understood nothing, would just leave far, far faster than he does. He’s no box of secrets to pry open and he knows it, but it runs a stab down his stomach to imagine Ilberd prodding him and his life even on friendly terms.

“You know he’s going to keep trying to write you,” Ilberd says, softly to his back just as he moves to leave one day. “He’s stubborn like that.”

I know, Atlin thinks. He twists to look back to the man’s eyes, and gives him a curt nod for his efforts before leaving.

*

2

“The  _ Brass Blades _ ?”

Raubahn winces visibly from the sound of Atlin’s voice penetrating the every spacious crevasse of the Fragrant Chamber. They’re here together alone for the first time in what feels like weeks- could have been, Atlin hasn’t even  _ paid attention _ \- and the Flame General looks tired, tired enough from whatever the hell’s transpired in Ul’dah since he left.

But Atlin would rather rip his head off than let him get on thinking, even for a minute, that any of this was  _ okay.  _ “Do you think me stupid, that I don’t know who they’re no better than sellswords to the Syndicate themselves? How many you’re leaving to  _ me _ to command to Coerthas?” he barks, feeling the hard bark of the congress table bite his hand as he slams it down. It’s too weak a sound, but then everything is too weak for the moment.

He’s stared a void in the face and killed it and lost a friend for it, and here’s Raubahn looking that same void on and tossing aside every good man he has.

“The sultana decreed my proposal was sound.” The reasoning of someone so much older than him. Atlin knows it is. He knows it’s the reasoning of someone who’s led more men than he ever has, has seen more of them die than he ever wants to. “And I trust you, Atlin, for your history, for you-’

“Don’t,” he hisses, holding up a hand as the Flame General steps to approach. “And don’t  _ fucking  _ tell me you did this for me.”

Raubahn respects him enough to stay there by the screens away from the table, but frowns. “You tell me if it would have been right if I hadn’t, E’tahlin. The others were content to let the Scions save Ishgard on its entire lonesome- let  _ you  _ save it alone with your paltry gathering of friends.”

“Don’t fucking call me E’tahlin like it’ll make me change my mind about this or forgive you saying the Scions are a paltry gathering,” he hisses, biting back the- the pressure, whatever it is, in his temples, his eyes. “I’m not worth you dying.”

He didn’t think his blood could boil like this. He really couldn’t. It almost takes his breath away, how much his circulation pounds in his brain and creates that static overbearing noise that could make him black out at any moment.

He’s spent weeks crawling deeper and deeper into every herb and drink he can find to remain calm and hope that Ul’dah’s own issues would resolve, that the truth would come crawling out from its dismal spaces and he could beat it all away once and for all with two knives in hand. He’s spent  _ weeks  _ staying that flimsy line of calm and intoxicated to see himself to this room and see this man safe in front of his own two eyes.

Only for Raubahn to throw his every good hope and safety away, throw every good man to come with Atlin instead to Ishgard.

“Do you know, do you fucking  _ know- _ ” he feels his nails breaking across the wood. It’s a hurt that can in everything else bind him down to a reality that’s here and now- not every possibility he’s exhausted in his brain for the past days, the sheer  _ terror  _ as he’s thought on the Ivy and on Ilberd’s movements about the Scions, aching with a senselessly powerful suspicion and fear as he watched that man’s every maneuver through Gridania and Ul’dah. He’s felt like a dog run about a million spaces chasing some dummy trail, left to doubt his every thought as the Hyur found some other mission for him and Allegrezza to prowl on until they both sat there at the end of it all, in a silence, looking to each other with an unspoken look of confusion, suspicion.

He the  _ fuck  _ does he tell Raubahn how deeply he doesn’t trust the man he calls an old friend and lover?

“I don’t know.” Raubahn’s succinct enough to admit it. It’d be comforting any moment else. But it isn’t now. “Tell me, then.” His voice is soft, so gentle like he thinks Atlin’s some fragile thing about to break, not a Hero, not a man that’s come to the Chrysalis and emerged alive, bloodstained and victorious. “Please.”

He cracks. The tears have threatened him every day for the many weeks, building in every missive and word from every place the Scion’s have had him go with Grezza. They’ve stung on his eyes in private moments where he and Allegrezza have ridden the snowy plains of Coerthas, knowing full well he’s left the spies and cutthroats of Ul’dah to walk among its unknowing general. “Do you know how many times I’ve been called to Revenant’s Toll on urgent business, and how much every time I thought that I’d be called here to Ul’dah because it had all finally fallen apart?”

He stands there then- every damn bit of him taking up that space across the gilded lighting of the Fragrant Chambers, a world they finally have to their own that Atlin is horrified to think, maybe he doesn’t even want. His own chest is pounding, terrifying him in its intensity as he stays determined to meet Raubahn’s gaze, pick away at that every stalwart, ‘I’m older than you and so know better than you’ glimpse written in his gray eyes.

He  _ wants  _ to fucking cry now, he feels so useless.

Raubahn remains that respectful distance. Lets Atlin take in the every reality of him as he is and always will be as the General of the Flames, the right hand man of the sultana, the everything he is when he isn’t with him.

“I worry about you just as much. But I wish you would trust me enough to know I’d stay safe, Atlin.”

“I did until you sent away your best men from your side when you and Nanamo Ul’namo are sitting in a pit full of vipers,” he hisses.

It’s the last of his composure to say it. There’s not a single drug or drink in the world to keep him composed in this moment, not when every last general has left Ishgard to burn down in the face of the dragons but Raubahn, Raubahn and his men and offerings and efforts and sympathetic gazes. He’s been haunted with the constant choking possibility of getting word of assassination- amid the million journeys plucking bombs from the heart of camps and watching friends rip themselves open to the Aether, he hasn’t been able to forget that possibility no matter how hard he’s tried.

He could scream because he knows, he knows if he just asked it, the general would cross this room and hold him because he needed it, and he would keep him there as tight and safe as he needed to be until the storm was gone.

“Does it make you feel better?” Atlin asks, staring to that patient face for an answer. “Are you  _ trying  _ to destroy yourself like you’d be a better man for it? Some kind of saint?”

Raubahn’s face is stony and undecipherable. “Are you, E’tahlin?” he returns. “I’ve a city and a sultana and a code, but the Scions serve  _ all _ of Hydaelyn and put you and Kravitz as its champions, its would-be martyrs.”

He’s not wrong. But they have a god on their side.

... _ Had  _ a god on their side. Atlin mumbles soft assent and looks away.

“So should I merely watch you burn yourself to nothing over the every matter of the world without a word, and react as any other general would?”

“Yes.” He knows, has known for years that when he cries- truly cries- he is silent. “No. I don’t… I don’t know.” Were no one to see his face, stand at right the angle, they’d hardly know but for the stutters of his breath. He’s been proud of it in too many moments- a visor kept better than any smoke screen or mudra to hide him from the world and keep any mistake of his demeanor and heart hidden. An ability to move on and smile because that’s so much kinder and sensible than debilitating tears.

But he cries. Like tearing a blazing ache across his eyes, he does, and it soaks against his visor before springing past the bounds of the steel, stroking his cheeks until he  _ has  _ to turn away. Any other general would have left Ishgard to burn. Every other general  _ has  _ left Ishgard to burn.

“All you have to do was keep yourself safe,” he whispers. I can’t burn to nothing if I know you’re safe. I won’t.

He’d thought, he’d really thought as they’d made the preparations for the journey south from Mor Dhona, that he would resent an inevitable rejection. That he’d find Raubahn and redress him for looking to Ul’dah’s interests above some foreign territories, then charge away with his Scions and Allegrezza and bleed and burn and handle it anyway. That they’d fight about it and then speak about it and then fuck over it and then lay it down in a past they could share together.

He’d expected every aching, hesitant voice of support from Kan-E-Sanna and Merlwyb, because the strife of their own regions were enough to contend with, and infinitely so were Ul’dah’s.

“Would that I could, I’d share the battlefield with you.”

He shakes his head, nails breaking on the table as they claw across its wood.

“You say you’re not worth me dying, but you have more than once saved our very  _ world _ .”

No.

“And I won’t die.”

No.

“I won’t do that to you. And I want my men to keep you safe.”

_ No _ .

“You can’t be your sultana’s only, last and best defense if something happens, you fucking idiot,” he rasps. “You’ll die.”

He stares numbly to his fingers, the radiating, sweet distracting pain of the blood slowly seeping from the displaced beds of his nails, the splinters dug in infinitesimal pricks along his fingertips. He can hear Raubahn slowly stepping to him like a distant, distant thrumming of a war drum somewhere anywhere but here.

“E’tahlin.” He says his name the way Atlin imagines he would say the word ‘love’. “If I can’t defend her then I’m no man worthy of her, or you.” He’s behind him now. Atlin can feel it like sunlight brushing the side of him, his voice this close and piercing the low thrum of the pain in his fingers. “Please, let’s not. You’ve enough to contend with and I haven’t seen you in so long.”

He’s being turned around now. That sash of his is ripped something awful from the Chrysalids, tattered ends running through Raubahn’s fingers as he examines it wordlessly. He just hasn’t had time to replace it. Or do anything, really, past fight and dash madly from world to world beside an equally exhausted Allegrezza until the day’s seen them both collapse asleep and wordless in some vacant room not even changed out of the ragged tatters of their battleclothes.

Atlin closes his eyes and wills himself to stay composed, stops Raubahn’s touch when the man moves to slip away his visor. His eyes are burning something pathetic, and the redness of his nose and face are enough of a giveaway without him being seen openly in tears.

No, he doesn’t get to see him look like this. He won’t  _ touch  _ his visor. “You’re going to die,” he says, voice quivering as he squeezes the scarred, leathery skin of the man’s wrist, stepping away from the space of him. “If you’re not going to die, you’re going to be hurt and you’re going to make it my fault because you want to look so  _ fucking  _ noble. So fuck you,” he whispers. “Fuck you, General Raubahn Aldynn, because you’re a selfish, selfish bastard. You’re not saving the life of some shallow addict wastrel by fucking him. You’re not a  _ fucking  _ saint.”

There’s a step- a flicker of fear almost in his body as he feels the pressure of Raubahn’s arm tighten against his own shoulder as the man’s gray eyes narrow. “You don’t know what you speak of and you know it,” he growls.

Atlin has known over and over before that Raubahn could so easily hurt him, take him and fling him like a toy and leave him there crushed and bloody against the chamber tables.

But he lets him go, and the sharp inhale they both gives seems to resound on the chamber walls. And Atlin leaves to the pace of his own pounding heart before he can let himself change his mind.

*

He doesn’t remember leaving Raubahn there as much as he remembers the tunnel vision of the glorious gold chandeliers of the Royal Promenade, the close look of his own boots as he made the easy jump from the balconies to the lower streets and walked the Pearl Lane. He thinks he intends to make it back to reconvene with Allegrezza and Alphinaud in the inn and discuss their next moves and journey north- at least, he recalls something along the lines of it hours later when he rouses in his own inn bed, the last remnants of his high crawling away down his skull.

The sun is in the sky and tells him he’s lost more than a few hours to his odyssey of oblivion. And Allegrezza’s silhouette frames itself around in that blaring yellow light where she sits to his bedside, absentmindedly running her fingertips over her rings like she’s counting them or something.

He’s had his moments of appearing late to Ul’dahn convening meetings or not at all; her the excess stocks of delectable Coerthan berry-stock wine and mysterious nights away and singular small glistening rings. They’ve both known better to ask more, done well for turning away for months. For all the other knows a passionate few nights are now long over; Allegrezza doesn’t comment, after all, when he crawls out of bed without so much as a limp and sidles in, silently, to her side.

“You made a mess of your hands and you wouldn’t tell me why yesterday,” she says, looking at him askance. “You know why I’m here?”

“Because I’m amazing company.” It’d be a great response if Grez wasn’t so worried and he wasn’t so fucking drained in every way he’d never known he could be. The light ripped from them both has swept nine million and one aches across their worlds and bodies- the Ascian’s assault, in particular, too recent for either of them to even really know how to settle back to their own easy ways. “No,” he says, tiredly. “Sorry. Should I? What’s going on?”

And the laughing used to come so much easier than the seriousness.

“We spoke yesterday of leaving for Coerthas at this time,” she says. Her eyes are bright to talk of such a barren hellish land- Atlin’s said more than once that Grez’s cheer for Coerthas was never just as present when they finally eventually  _ did  _ end up shifting in knee-deep snow, the cold biting away all senses from their fingers and toes. “I packed up for you, so we can just go.”

‘Packing up’ for him is putting his daggers and coat to the doorside, because even for all the glory neither of them really know much more than that. Trystane’s managed his so-called estate ever since Momodi insist he employ the Elezen, but Atlin’s hardly even seen the treasures he’s passed to his hands as soon as they’ve gone. Much less cared to unless as they sold a good coin. “All that effort to pack me up,” he laughs as he rolls from the bed, picking his pauldrons and sashes and jacket and visor from the floor in an attempt to look like some respectable hero again.

They don’t much speak of that stab through the chest they’d felt that day with the Keeper of the Lake.

They especially don’t speak of it now that they know how the Ascians could use it so. But Atlin turns to her as he dresses, looks her over from prim boots to the tip of her postman’s hat, and finds himself saying, “I’ve wondered, you know, if we are even as strong as we were- just as fighters- without Hydaelyn.”

She snorts, that familiar hardness coming to her eyes from the topic. Grez got on with gods even worse than he did, and he’d learned it early on, but somehow it was always strange to see her affected composure stiffen with the mention of matters of Primals and Hydaelyn. “I don’t. If I should be a good mage I’d rather be of my own work rather than the love of some faceless entity randomly deciding it took a fancy.”

He wishes he could agree. But he can imagine the wreckage of his own making, the poison pervading through the blood of millions in seconds and setting this entire screaming loudness in his own brain to a final silence if he could but have the power of a god in his hands again.

He wishes he wasn’t dreaming of corpses plucked out of the sky by his own daggers, but it’s like a meditation, a mantra when every other thought sends him spiraling to a paralysis of terror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Funnily enough, I wrote each of these as I followed the MSQ and with no idea of what was, well, to come. So I didn't know even when I was writing this.  
> As always, I'd love to hear what you think. I have the next few installments written so I'll try to pace them out over the next week or two. You can also find me on Tumblr as Kollapsar if you're interested in that.


	4. burn out the stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Welcome to the pain. We're at the end of 2.55 and the beginning of Heavensward. Which was a ride to play through and write for. I wish I had sweet, sweet smut for you guys, but I'll make it up to you, I swear.  
> Gentle warning for some withdrawal symptoms and indirect self-harm this chapter, and there's some blink-and-you-miss-it Allegrezza/Haurchefont.

The blood is soaked in crusted splays across his shirt. He realizes before he even opens his eyes- it’s hard and chafes across his skin when he shifts, send pricking weary jolts of something like tears to his skull as he settles- truly settles- into reality.

He’s alone. And he was seizing last night: the vomit rank on the sheets beside his pillow is evidence, the way he remembers he’s woken plenty a time before, when he’d fallen too far after a high and not had enough to bring himself back up in time. But past all of that something inside him feels empty, like a hand shoved beneath his ribs and ripped them out, and worse, far worse is the trembling of the world in his vision and the irrevocable shudder of his hands on his thighs.

It takes him a horrified moment of recalling before he’s ripping his shirt off entirely, looking around in a panic as he registers where he is, what he has _done._ Outside the wind and snow howl like a dying man’s last breath, pitchy and mournful.

Ul’dah. He needs to go back. He springs to his feet, ignoring how his very bones protest the movement, rattling in a tremble of his knees as he rises. Ul’dah- he staggers out of bed, tearing away the tangle of the sheet with a heady gasp as he steps to the sunlight and the too-bright world pours white upon his skin.

He tries his voice as he moves, swaying as he rummages through his effects, the small box of things he’s kept in Dragonhead since they’d taken more frequent visits to the camp. It’s hoarse and a remnant of itself, scraped raw from the acid that’s sat in his throat overnight, chafed from screaming in that moment in the chambers when Ilberd swung his sword and arced a blinding spray of blood across his vision.

He was swallowing ragged terror even after Raubahn had raced to his and Allegrezza’s side, even after the aching rope round his wrists had been severed. Because Raubahn had looked to him once- just once- with eyes so suddenly pained and lips parted like he meant to say something before he was turned away.

Raubahn. Who could be dead as he thinks, meddles here with paltry things like finding a fucking _shirt._ He chokes down the rising sob, blinking away the blur in his vision as he tears on a new button up and jacket, some worn relic of mission work weeks gone by.

Ilberd had declared him an assassin and an imperial whore, a walking debauchery crawling into the Flame General’s bed for coin and influence. But he was worse than the every accusation, and he knew it like he would know a knife in his chest. If Ilberd had not killed Raubahn _\- no, don’t think of that, don’t-_ he’d certainly done well to destroy the livelihood he’d bled and fought to make in Ul’dah. He’d ripped away his sultana and his prowess and his honor all in a single sweep.

And he’d more than liberally used Atlin to do it.

He feels as much a traitor and murderer as the captain insisted he was.

*

The looks of confusion in the room were flagrant until they weren’t- until Ilberd had triumphantly brought up the sheer number of Ul’dahn men slain at the Ishgardian gates by the Scions’ lead, scores men trusted to his lead when none others had volunteered but a few. Until he ripped out countless scrolls of letters with Raubahn’s seal upon them to fall at Atlin’s feet- every private letter of favor the general had so written for the Hero of Light.

All of it.

The stirring panic rose to a breaking point as he’d rained every accusation on the Scions, Allegrezza, Minfilia- the confusion overwhelmed to a roar, sweeping over the corpse of Teledji Adeledji until it was shattered by a single motion.

Until the blood scored over the floor and blackened and Atlin was all but cutting his arms open on the ropes that bound him, trying to move, trying to do _anything_.

He could still remember that hellish clamor of crossing swords striking the air behind him as Grezz had all but bodily dragged him, screaming and thrashing, from chaos of the chambers.

The Scions were plucked away one by one from there. In the tunnels, the paths, the starlit fields, leaving him hoarsely yelling to be let back, let him go, _let him go back_ until Allegrezza had to cast something on him to knock him out almost entirely, shoving him over her shoulder and running for the hills with Alphinaud and the Flame Marshal in tow.

The exhaustion and tears come later. Somewhere in the blur of Pipin sitting beside him, whispering a promise, does Atlin realize he’s crying silently. He gathers himself just enough to give a weak nod. Because the Flame Marshal is likely hurting just as he is, and here he is, tearless and staring determined to the black sky behind the carriage.

At some point he knows, knows the Lalafell wants an answer- an answer to one of the many questions that’s been hanging rotting in the air around them. Pipin looks to him earnestly, fixing him with a stare that he can’t help but return, numbly. “He said nothing of you outright,” he says, and Atlin registers that with a hollow pang in the chest, because he knows he deserves that, that he wanted that- to have none know of him and Raubahn. “But,” he breathes, “I could tell in time by the way he spoke of you. And when I asked he acquiesced. And he’d asked in turn that should the opportunity ever arise, I assist you in any way I could, Atlin.”

Shite. No, no, no. His eyes burn behind his visor, threatening him again with a broken composure. Beside him, Allegrezza shifts- and he can see in his peripheral vision Alphinaud looking up as well, blue eyes slowly widening with that look of realization. He chews on the inside of his mouth so hard it could bleed and looks away, wordless, letting his heart thunder in his ears.

“I don’t believe the word that you were merely using my father for power,” Pipin adds, expression stern. “He has never been that brand of fool.”

He doesn’t agree. Raubahn’s been every brand of fool. But he has no words to say; the Lalafell is throwing stones down a long-parched well. Past the burning pain in his throat and his eyes and the disconnection he feels between his head and his limbs he can’t make his fucking mouth find a single word to say.

So they say nothing after that, soaking in the sound of gears and wind as they ride and stew in all that has happened. The high of his last smoke dims and clarity comes swinging down like an axe, every last possibility burning through his brain. Every single moment from the point that Nanamo Ul’namo crashed to the floor replays until he could throw up.

He could have prevented this. He’d known. If he’d just- if he’d been sober, if he’d pushed harder on his suspicions instead of charging forward, blindly, if he’d just fucking-

Allegrezza squeezes his arm quickly. “We’re here,” she whispers. “Atlin. We have to go.”

Numbly he lets her drag him off the carriage, feeling himself cling to her for any amount of fleeting stability. It feels like he’s almost floating, like he could keel over at any moment and not even feel the ground bite his jaw. He looks to the sky and the distant, distant orange halo of Ul’dah on the horizon, inhales sharply, turns to Pipin.

“I’ll come back. I promise I will,” he whispers, just as they step away to follow Cid’s path in the moonlight.

For a moment he doesn’t even know if he heard him. No one else seems to have. But Pipin returns his gaze with eyes on fire. “I know you will, Scion. Now go.”

*

He’s expecting it, but it still scalds his insides when he steps to the outdoors and feels the whip of the wind and the frigid air constrict in his ragged airways. He lets it, takes several breaths more, lets it soak over his shivering body until his jaw is locked with the cold and his bare fingers tremble. The hubbub of soldiers dances all around him in the arms of that wind, and the dismal light of a wintry sun casts a shimmer across the entirety of the fort.

The mess hall is quiet, littered only with the occasional knight in the off-hours of dining. He’s snowbitten from the walk, and feels his stomach give a hard tight cramp as the soldiers behold him, acknowledge him without a word, step aside and tentatively move to their own concerns as he drifts through the chambers.

He finds a space by Alphinaud, who’s picking slowly away at a platter of clearly lukewarm potatoes. He’s bundled in Coerthan robes, looking entirely too small for them. He moves over politely to make space, lets Atlin squeeze in to sit beside him.

The food sitting up on offer in the middle of the table is an array of garlic pork rind and potatoes and stew, all plucked away and carved and diminished from an earlier luncheon hour. Neither of them reach for any of it; Alphinaud instead nurses an ale and stares holes in his potatoes and Atlin pours a drink for himself with shaking hands.

He’s almost breathless from his own anxiety when he finally rasps, “What news?”

_Is he alive._

“I’m forbidden from further convention in the chambers until Allegrezza’s said her piece to the ambassador on our behalf,” the youth says, voice hollow. He’s speaking into his goblet more than anything else, but looks to Atlin askance with a frown. “Unless that’s not what you were asking.” A short pause, before painedly, he adds, “The Syndicate and Crystal Braves have Ul’dah. General Aldynn has been captured and is to be tried for high treason.” An inhale. “Atlin, I…”

So he’s alive. Something uncoils in his chest and gives way to fresh despair; so he’s alive, he’s _alive-_ but only just so.

He’s too tired to look away when Alphinaud trails off. Tired still to reply and give Alphinaud anything for that questioning look. There’s nothing to confirm; Alphinaud was present much as he was the night before in the carriage with Pipin.

“Atlin, I’ve failed you,” Alphinaud breathes. “I’ve failed you just as I have the rest of Eorzea in my zeal for glory.” He looks gravely to the halls, to the door. “I’ve failed you both.”

Atlin won’t ask if he means him and Grez, or him and Raubahn. Neither case means much to him; Alphinaud seems genuinely, naively sorry for all of it at once, as if he really could have done a damn thing when Atlin had had every card in his hand to play to avert this, drag the wool away, push just a little harder.

The youth continues, almost babbling at this point if not for his low, affected calm, “There’s not enough a way to apologize but I owe it to you to acknowledge what’s happened.” His eyes are too dark-rimmed and sunken for Atlin to think he owes him a thing. “I could have done something, with Ilberd, I should have-”

Without a word, he gets up, feeling the bile rise up his throat even as he escapes the wafting scents of food and human sweat, escaping the hall with accelerated, heavy footsteps.

The air blasts his face and for a moment he thinks he may regain composure, standing there and letting the frost ground him to reality- until the past days all rise up at once like a kick to the stomach and a truth coming down to crush him, and he’s leaned to the wall of a snowcapped alley, heaving the grand sum of bile, acid and nothing from his body.

Shite, he’s pathetic.

Raubahn isn’t his. Atlin had _insisted_ that: rebuffed him at every offer, staunchly said so in every meeting, called him General in moments when he’d grown too tender. He’d insisted on their secrets, guarded their shared hours jealously out of fear- fear of enemies, but moreso, fear of his own fucking incompetence bringing about something exactly like this.

Yet for all his efforts to keep the fact of them safe, it wasn’t. And for all his efforts to keep the general at a nonchalant, pleasantly safe distance, he never had been.

His stomach is lurching painfully with dry heaves now, sending pained tears to prick his tired eyes as he falls to his knees with the last of his breath. He can already see his vomit and tears icing in the snow. And faintly, over the snowdrift he can hear the doors of Lord Haurchefont’s war room groan open. The meeting must be over.

He considers moving out the alley, greeting them, resuming a forced pretense of himself for the sake of everyone. The violent shaking of his entire body says, no, no, you can’t even try. Don’t even try. Don’t say a word.

He staggers back to his quarters instead, snow crusting on his knees and between his fingers, and mixes his own potions as quickly as he can to conjure a tincture that can knock him so senseless perhaps he can even outrun his own inevitable dreams. It tastes disgusting, like marshwater, but he crams it down his throat anyway, drops to his filthy sheets and shuts his eyes, hearing the air fill with the sound of his own harsh breath.

Rest. He needs rest, for the sun to set, for his body to tide over the storm left in him by the drugs until he can stand without shaking again, move without breathing so hard he feels like he’s dying. Rest, so he can leave as soon as he can in the night and change this. All of this. Before it kills him.

*

He wakes up to blackness and wonders if he really _is_ dead for a moment. His body certainly feels like it. But he shifts, feels the cold of the air prick his ears and tail, hears something papery wrinkle to his side, and knows then that he isn’t, and this is real, and he needs to move, _now._

He stumbles in the dark to light the oil lamp by his desk, fumbles in that meager light for his knives, some armor, a bandolier of potions- everything he needs. He need only be hidden long enough to get to the quarters of the Braves, wrench Captain Ilberd’s last breath from his throat with his bare hands, and do much the same for Lord Lolorito before the first breath of dawn. He need only snatch the keys from any guard about the dungeons, need only push long and hard enough in the labyrinthine darkness to find him and make this right.

The supplies are meager- nothing like his previous armor, which now sits torn apart and bloody in a pile to the corner of the room. But it’ll do. It has to.

Something crumples by his feet as he turns, jolting him with a sharp breath. It’s a note, thrown to the floor when he got out of bed. Allegrezza’s elegant, tight script peers up at him from beneath his boot, and for a moment he considers not reading it. Let her stay here, he thinks, with that faceless lover of hers she finds here, with Alphie, let her make any form of comfort.

In spite of himself he leans down and reads it.

_Atlin,_

_I came by earlier but you didn’t wake up. There’s bread on the table by the door, and water. If I come back and you haven’t eaten it, you’re in trouble. I’m probably in my quarters, so come by, please. We should talk._

He shudders with something like a laugh. Looking to the door, yes- there is a loaf of bread and a cup of water waiting for him. Allegrezza would. Allegrezza, who’s already dragged him and Alphinaud through malms of waist-deep snow, Allegrezza who silently shouldered their every useless tear and now still worries for them more than she ever does for herself.

Gods, at least now with her name dragged through the mud, perhaps she can take a breath from her countless duties as a Warrior of Light. Perhaps she can find whoever it is she always finds when she comes here and just _breathe_ the way she deserves to, and smile easier than she does.

He forces himself to eat, feels his stomach lurch as soon as the first bites have wrestled their way down, alternates between it and the water until it’s halfway down and he feels just strong enough to do this.

He shoulders only a threadbare cloak to leave. He won’t need it long- only to stay unrecognized, only to the point where he can cast himself to the Aether and far, far away from here. The stone floor of the barracks gives the gentle tempo of his boots peeling off of them, pressing to the next point as he slowly moves from the door of his quarters to the end of the hallway.

The fort is quiet; outside is so preternaturally hollow-sounding he knows that in that stillness the snow has absorbed every last whisper of the trees or a patrol. The moon shines loud, silvery light over the well-trod grounds around Camp Dragonhead, but he can’t protest the otherwise favorable circumstances.

He makes cautious way, creeping slowly until he’s in the shade of the arch, surveying the yard about the Aetheryte for a soul before sprinting for it, the snow crunching a hard rhythm beneath him, his breath fogging in his eyes and almost blinding him.

He feels calm, strangely. Like this is what he needs to do- this is right and nothing else will ever be. This is penance, harder and deeper than any moments Raubahn had cradled him after they’d made love, this is a penance so deeply set he’ll need to kill to claw it out of himself. He is calm.

“Atlin?”

He stills, feeling his body almost instinctively lurch to a combative stance.

“Atlin,” Allegrezza says, firmer now. “Don’t.”

The Aetheryte is only but five yalms from him. A short, short distance he could gun just before she could run to reach him, cast anything to stop him. But he stops, tracing out the form of the tall Roegadyn. Her robes are dragging across the snow, and her hat cutting a hard silhouette in the moonlight, and with her staff in hand she is most _definitely_ ready to cast to immobilize him.

His eyes adjust, find her features framed by that ragged, silver hair. She looks as just as tired as he is. If not more. Almost automatically, he thinks, _Shite, Grez, you’re one to talk about all that moderation you preach to me and Alphie._ “What are you doing out here?” he asks, instead, surprised by the firmness of his own voice.

She pauses, expression twisting to something he knows only as pain. “I’m on patrol,” she says. “Atlin, I know what you’re doing, but please. Just come over here.. We can talk. You can’t just-”

“Leave?” he interrupts, feeling his jaw lock with an unconscious frustration. With her, with himself, he doesn’t know. “I can. I’m trained to move without a sound and kill without a sound and that’s what I intend to do, Grez. I did this. Only I can-”

She shakes her head, gritting her teeth. “No, you can’t, and no, you didn’t,” she murmurs. “Atlin, I know what you’re capable of, but you and I both know you’re in no state to get through the streets of Ul’dah when they’re on full patrol.” They stand there for a moment, and he calculates just how quickly he may be able to move if he moves now, takes her off-guard somehow. “Please. I know how much you want to. I really do. I understand. But don’t.” Her voice cracks- ever so slightly, only so much that only someone like him could even know. “Not when the other scions did what they did to let us live. It’s just us, Atlin. You, me and Alphinaud to carry the fire.” She inhales. “I can do it, but don’t leave that to Alphie. Don’t do that to him.”

The tears prick his eyes, searing against the cold. He’d forgotten to wear his visor, regrets it now; his face is hot with the tears that are suddenly stroking his face, ripping a sob through his chest in spite of himself. “Grez, I can still save him,” he whispers. Any louder and she’ll hear how broken his voice is. “Right now I can still save him.” He sobs, breathlessly taking that harsh air until his insides burn- he can hear her sauntering toward him, wants almost to run then and there. “If I wait, if I wait and he- if I wait and he dies, Grez, I-”

His provisions clatter to the floor as she takes him in her arms and he feels himself crumple. And like a child, he takes her robes in his hands as fists as she tightens her embrace around him like she’s the only thing holding him together. Because she is. He can’t stop shaking, he can’t stop hyperventilating into her shoulder as the tears, the fear, the _fear_ wrack over his body. “Don’t do this by yourself,” she murmurs, almost cooing to his hair as she runs her fingers through it, gently scratching along his scalp by the sensitive base of his ears. “We can all still fix this. And we will, all right?”

He wants to believe her so badly.

They stand out there for a long time after- until he can feel them both shivering with a cold that threatens to consume them. She hasn’t stopped holding him, hasn’t stopped soothingly running her hands over his shoulders and hair, can’t seem to let go like she’s afraid he’ll run at any moment, or simply fall apart.

“We should go inside,” Allegrezza says, her voice stuttered with a chatter. “Come on. You need to warm up...” She draws away very slowly, gradually, gripping his shoulders as she looks him in the eye.

He stares back to her, exhausted from the tears, feeling so hollow he feels ready to heft himself to the ground to shatter and be done, be so done, because he is so tired. And he knows she is too, because despite her voice, she is sunken and just as hollowed out as he is.

Wordlessly he lets himself be guided inside. “Your retainer-” Allegrezza starts, as the door groans shut behind them, leaving a resounding echo as it shuts across the entire emptiness of the barracks antechamber, “he came by earlier, on delivery. He said he thought you’d need it.”

He lets her press the wax packet to his hand, feels the familiar cloying scent rise up from it even as he just stares at it. Trystane shouldn’t even be working for him any more, but damn the Elezen’s loyalty; he’s not even surprised.

“You stay right here,” the Roegadyn orders, “go warm up, light that up or... something, I’m going to be right back with some tea, and if you’re not here when I return-”

Apparently a look is enough to say what he means to say, because Allegrezza stops talking the second he turns to return her gaze. She pauses, looks away at once and moves to the kitchen, going so slowly he knows she’s watching him at every pace. Wondering if he’ll leave.

He’s too tired to, now.

Wordlessly he walks to the fireplace, holds the packet over the radiating heat and lets it slip from his hands. Numb, he watches the flame lick away the twine wrap, the wax, consume the contents until the room is filled with the harsh aroma of charred herb and paper.

*

Every day he spends waking up and knowing he is alive and free and eating a meal and breathing the crisp air of Ishgard is one he knows is stolen from Raubahn. Every passing moment of triumph he reaps, a quiet second where Allegrezza is hovering behind him and measuring his shoulders for a new set of armor, every moment she looks to him with a wordless look of concern and takes him into her arms is one where the man is somewhere else in the bowels of the Ul’dahn palaces.

Rotting.

They pluck away at errant missions while they await word on their appeals. Allegrezza trims her hair, fills out with brighter eyes by the day until the night comes that he finds her in her chambers and learns at last who her lover is- has been. But she doesn’t stop looking at him in that very particular way- that lingering concern that eats at his skull when he looks away and pretends he doesn’t notice.

He can’t find the excited quips or flippant rebuttals for any situation they cross anymore. He can’t really find much to say at all past the utilitarian, pragmatic yes or no, or an occasional affected comment or question. At some point she just takes him to a factory in the heart of the city, thrusts a heavy device to his hands, and takes him out to learn it.

It hurts- digs a bruise into his shoulder from where he sidles it to gain a steady aim. It blasts through his ears and leaves them ringing. But it also sprays into the skin of every foe they cross and paints the white snow red. And it doesn’t require he use poison as his daggers do.

No. Musket shots don’t need poison to be fatal.

They are instantaneous.

Over time, Allegrezza smiles a little more, even seems to drift off from the present at dinners, looking to her love across the table with something distant and warm that Atlin now recognizes all too keenly. He can’t even make himself resent her for it, she’s such a frenetic brand of happy in the continued presence of Haurchefont that he can almost see her blooming over the passage of mere days. And the young Lord Graystone is much the same, in spite of his concerted efforts to look otherwise.

Alphinaud begins digging through towers of books, already trying to pick up the pieces of their shambled plans, already finding more to say by the day. Just a little more. In time he tiptoes around Atlin with talk of progress, plans, and news of the southern regions before disappearing behind his books again- and that’s enough. For now that’s more than enough for him to know Alphinaud will be all right.

As the world’s slowly sewed up all around him, Atlin wishes he could feign just a vestige of happiness, ward off those _looks_. They don’t need to worry about him. They need to fix their eyes forward, to Ishgard, and past that to that singular objective, that decisive moment at last when they can finally return to Ul’dah. He wishes he could fake being himself, but he’s so tired his brain buzzes behind his eyes when he goes to bed at night, arms aching, shoulders aching, body littered with brand new bruises that come to replace the ones that fade.

And he doesn’t smoke anymore. The sobriety lets him feel every wound that much keener. He lets it be a reminder. And he counts every sunrise, watches the stars burn out, consumed by the white of the Ishgardian sky, and he makes his promise, again, in the same breath as his apology and his confession:

_I’ll come for you. I’m so sorry I never said I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I'm a huge nerd, there is some art for this on my Tumblr under the tag oc: atlin tarn lmao, or just my art tag in the shortcuts on the left column.  
> Please let me know what you think and how I'm driving. Peace.  
> Oh. Psst. If you want nsfw art for this stuff, there's voidbooty on tumblr too.


	5. but leave me the moon

“ _ Atlin _ -”

If Allegrezza says anything past that, he doesn’t hear her. His breath is harsh and comes difficult to his chest, the strain of running already catching him short as he sprints headlong forward. Alphinaud, Allegrezza, Yugiri- he knows they don’t have a chance of keeping pace.

He doesn’t care. He is a ball of lightning; or rather, he  _ feels _ one, down in his heart’s screaming, thumping, compelling him to race forward. With a song of steel his daggers draw, and the sweat already forms in a cold sweep on his brow beneath his visor.

The racing, the anticipation through the thinned air of Ishgard may have prepared him for much, but not this; not the bloodspill of his arms working a frenetic pace through the lancer before him, not the hard visceral cry that escapes his throat as he tears through the bodies.

A blaze of fire bathes his path in a vivid orange light- he thanks Grez under his own breath, knowing full well that she can’t hear, he’s too far ahead.

But his daggers have been soaked for this moment, sharpened and ready that they not fail him. That nothing fail him as he crawls deeper into these bloody bowels of Halatali. Because he’s so, so terrified something will. And that it could be the only thing that makes a difference between it all.

*

“ _ You… you came.” _

He almost crashes into the Magitek field when he finds it, dagger’s edge dragging across it in one hard, screeching metallic reverberation because Raubahn is  _ there,  _ he’s  _ right there, _ gasping and looking back to him- “Atlin!” Alphinaud gasps from somewhere distant behind him. “Atlin, there’s no point. It’s some kind of device, we have to-”

He gasps, hand sliding across that field, its cold solidity sliding back up against him as Alphinaud explains, as Yuyuhase speaks. He’s right there, Atlin thinks, beside a stream of curses, and the sound of his own ragged hard breathing from exhaustion. He’s  _ fucking right there. _

When the gates come down and the poison chokes his lungs with its oily, putrid smoke, he feels his own wrists scream with the impact of the attack on the iron bars.

_ Don’t exert yourself, you fool, _ Allegrezza yells at some point. Her voice is riddled with terror, the sort she doesn’t let show easily, but is sweeping her voice now, now when he needs it least.  _ You’ll only breathe it more. _

As if that  _ matters. _

The rage is a lot like tears; it overwhelms him, chokes him, drives his very body to move when he could try to will it to a reasonable pace. But he doesn’t try. He’s too afraid to try moderation; before he knows it the bars are shattered and bent around his gauntlets and daggers, magic sparking at every jagged edge of them from where Allegrezza has fired off spells. Moderation would have Raubahn breathe this poison a second more.

Yugiri screams across the field that she will tend Raubahn; it’s all he needs to tear through the last brittle iron bar of this damned cage and race back, searching at every point for the poison’s source, the  _ key.  _ He’s breathless by the pace of his own body, the sweat coating him beneath his armor, pervading in the poisonous air and rubbing filth into him as he rains a pillar of whipping water across the poison device- over and over until it sparks out, defeated and sputtering.

Now. He can hear the gates shrieking open, the panicked pace of the others racing to the antechambers. Now they find the key. Now he kills as many more people as he needs to until he can feel like he can breathe again.

*

Ilberd’s sword glistens abandoned and only just too far away from his hand to find.

Atlin doesn’t realize he’s been bleeding himself until he snaps to the present, finds his own thumbs pressed into the solid shifting mass of Ilberd’s gullet and pressing harder by the second. He’s dripping it all over the bastard’s face, his half-undone gauntlet rattling as he grunts with the effort of pressing down all the harder. He’s dreamt of tearing the breath from this man’s chest for moons now, dreamt of every way he could do it until his imagination’s been exhausted. And now he can finally look into his eyes and watch it slip from him, watch this all end.

It doesn’t. He cries out when the smoke bomb searing across his vision, blasting him back with a flare of white light.

The halos are still dancing in his vision when he scrabbles back to his feet, only to feel a hand wrap hard around him and seize him, knocking the wind from him until he slumps forward, watching Ilberd’s figure diminish with his comrades in his vision, his determination abruptly decimated as he feels the roughness of that palm, that weak floundering grip on his chest. He starts, gasping, “Grez, shite,  _ let me go-” _

The grip tightens to wrap across the entirety of his breastplate, smearing the blood and poison all across him.

It’s not Allegrezza.

“Atlin,” Raubahn grunts, the pain resonating in his voice and stabbing right through his ribs, “be still. He’s gone.”

Gods, no.  _ Raubahn.  _ Why’d he  _ move? _

He can’t turn fast enough. The daggers clatter noisily against the brown-crusted stone as he twists and holds the man like he’ll never hold him again. Because he could have forgotten these things: the flex of Raubahn’s back against his hands, the roughness of his skin pressed to his, his  _ everything _ , and he can feel the same hard grip around him like he never thought he’d feel again.

“Oh,” he whispers breathless, almost nauseated by the speed of it all, the  _ knowing  _ he’s there, finally, alive. “Oh gods, oh gods, are you- you shouldn’t-”

Raubahn just holds him harder, closer when he tries to draw away, speak more, find any combination of words that could possibly say how sorry he is. It leaves him to sob wordlessly, past speaking, wrapping his arms tight around the man’s body with no intention of letting him go again.

It takes Alphinaud’s hands to gently pry him away, apologies murmured all along, leave them to gather themselves as they rise. Because there is more to do and the world doesn’t stop just because his did.

No, they need to regather still, brief Raubahn, get him  _ out of here. _ He swallows down everything and lets it happen, gathering all of his composure to stay still as they draw through the news, their every step. There is so much more to get through and he can already feel the blooming, rising guilt that he even stopped once. Was selfish enough to. No, they need to keep moving.

But Raubahn takes his hand, briefly, as they stagger together upward to the light. He purses his lips, doesn’t dare look to him when he can already feel his presence, there, clasping him, the filth and blood of them both melded along their fingers.

What any of it could mean in the light of all that’s happened, he can’t dare think now.

*

In the end Allegrezza all but bodily piles him into the carriage with Raubahn and Yugiri without him needing to find a word to insist, waving with a tight smile as it rattles off across the rain-struck plains. That leaves him to work with shaking fingers at the man’s wounds, ignoring Yugiri’s every offering hand to help. Raubahn makes a noise of dissent at some point along the rocking of the carriage and the hard roar of the rain atop the roof, but Atlin finds enough in himself to curse the man in a stern enough garbled combination of words to silence him as he works- garner a grimly amused look from him, even.

He restrains his own reflexive sharp inhale of rage as he works at the filthy bandages, carefully examining the sutures where they’ve torn, shoving down the excess useless thoughts as he wipes away at the beginnings of infection. At some point Raubahn begins to hold him and hiss with the pain of his work- at some point he feels his shoulder almost crushed with the pressure, but works anyway, biting back his own tears to hear the man suffer.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs, “I wish I could-” He trails off as Raubahn takes a particularly hard breath and digs his face to the crook of his shoulder as he wipes the pus from a blackened, jagged edge of ripped flesh. The wound stinks of neglect, like the man was sewn together in some perfunctory fashion weeks ago and left since, the bandages aged and worn and putrid and damp when they fall away, and it sickens him, makes him swallow it all down as he goes on.

“Let me, Atlin,” Yugiri whispers, gently moving to the side of him and taking the rag from his hands. “I can assess the extent that the healers need to work. You hold him. He will need it.”

And he does. He does, badly, breathing sharp and labored into Atlin’s shoulder as he grips him harder, and it’s all he can do to hold him in turn, tightening with every breath, whispering every apology as Yugiri works as quickly as she can. Three months have weakened him and eaten away at his entire frame but he still hold him hard and desperate enough to take Atlin’s breath when Yugiri strokes across a particularly sensitive point of the wound.

It seems like eternity before it ends. And even then, as they bind him, she says, “That was the best of my ability but nothing of any skill; I apologize. It’s all I can do before we find a healer in Drybone.” It’s Atlin she looks to when she says it; a sort of reluctance crossing her face that he knows is in response to something in his own.

“Thank you,” he says, weakly. Weak words; he’s unable to tell her how much he means it.

Despite the rhythmic rocking of the carriage and the strain of his wounds, he holds Raubahn through to the end of the trip, running his hands through his braids, praying to gods he never believed in before.

*

Yugiri has to drag him away when they find a healer in Drybone- take his violently shaking hands and lead him to a bar instead, shoving something to him for the nerves, for his wounds. “You need to see someone yourself, Atlin,” she says, softly enough that he knows there’s no conviction behind it. And he knows it; his cuts may protest when he shifts, but with the blood dried he sits only a  _ picture  _ of wreckage- he feels as whole and composed as, he thinks, he could ever be right now.

“Thank you.” He can’t say it enough today. To Yugiri, to Allegrezza, to Alphinaud, to Merlwyb. To Raubahn, if only for turning out his every nightmare for the past three months in living alone.

Her gaze is gentle, the scales framing her face glistening as she turns away. “So many don’t get that chance to fight and possibly win when death comes for the ones we love- so when we do see it,” she smiles, “it’s more an honor to help someone fight that war.”

 

*

His heart stops when he finds him in his room.

Yugiri’s dragged him through three tankards of ale and a bath, at some point admitting that Allegrezza all but ordered this of her before they’d left Halatali. He’s had a veritable monsoon of work to slough through even in a supposed respite at Drybone- provisioning, mending his own blood and sweat-crusted plates of armor, paying off the carriages- working down every box of the imaginary checklist he knows Allegrezza would hold over his head as soon as they saw each other again.

Possibly avoiding this.

All the time Yugiri’s told him:  _ I’ll do what I can to see to it that you two see each other after he is treated. That you may stay together. _

Right. He has to remind himself of the fact now that they are in the southern regions once more, nestled in Ul’dah and not in insular Ishgard. The world just knows them now. The truth has been ripped from his hands, passed on tongues to be spread like paltry gossip. And for that exposure, now they can have an inn room to themselves like any other pair of lovers.

Like they _ are  _ lovers.

He didn’t know how to tell her; he wouldn’t even know if that’s what the Flame General would want, after all. What priority could their own personal entanglements have over the grand scheme of all this? Past the urgency of the moments they’d spent in the afternoon, all that had happened… he’d be an idiot to presume Raubahn would even really want to see his face in a calmer time. A more rational one.

His is the face of some failure Scion that couldn’t keep a single damn goblet from reaching the lips of the sultana, or keep the forces of the Immortal Flames grounded in the damn city where they’d belong, protecting her and her general both.

Somehow, past the anticipation that’s been building in him all the eve, it’s still unexpected when he finds him there, in his quarters of the inn, set up in the bed like some pillar incongruous in even the size of the furniture about him. Hells, he takes up most of the  _ bed _ , and he’s a sunken shadow of himself in those bandages and shorts.

He inhales and closes the door behind himself, feels the comforting weight of it click against the knob. He doesn’t presume to lock the door. He doesn’t presume anything. “I can-” he feels Raubahn staring into him, a strange blend of exhausted and so keen he almost wants to run again. If he could only stop wanting to just stay there and drink in the every inch of him here, alive, present. “I can speak to the innkeep of getting a separate room,” he says, shakily. “I’m sorry. Yugiri just- she assumed, and…”

The man inclines his head, struggling to shift in the bed to sit up a little closer with one arm before leaning forward with a frown. “You’re sober.”

He blinks. Of all things to- that? “I-” Atlin feels a nervous laugh breaking on his lips. “I- yes. I’m sober. The ale here’s watered enough to… to keep a flea... sober… Stop looking at me like that.” He’s beginning to feel naked even in a sleeping tunic.

It surprises him to hear Raubahn laugh. Scares and confuses him, even, because he could have never assumed the man would care to share that joy with him again. “E’tahlin. Come here.”

Gods,  _ that _ again. His  _ name. _ Why should his  _ name  _ make him feel like he’s getting crushed under the weight of things he hasn’t dared feel in months? “You don’t have to pretend,” he mutters, shifting and feeling his tail shift about behind him for want of something to do. “The last time we spoke alone together I… I said things, and I didn’t change that by letting everything…” he pauses, looks away. This hurts more than he expected. He wants to run, badly. “Everything happen.”

That earns him the sternness closer to what he’s expected all along. Raubahn’s brows knit in some sort of perplexity and frustration. “You don’t think I’ve had as much time to remember your every word as you have? More, even, in those pits that I’ve known too well from the bloodsands,” he speaks with an almost frightening softness. “And still I ask. E’tahlin,” he breathes, stifles a cough softly like he’s burying it in his chest. “Come here. Or say what’s changed, what is and isn’t now in the world, and be finished with it.”

Oh, there’s no way to say how everything has changed. And how it hasn’t.

He inhales and realizes somewhere in the process of breathing he’s started sobbing. He don’t dare pity Raubahn. He knows too well even in weakness and deterioration the Flame General held him strong enough to snap him out of his own fury in Halatali. But the state of him- the stump freshly wrapped about his shoulder, the contour of bone showing along his ribs- the state of him is hard to ignore.

Reluctantly he takes the first couple steps- then his knees fail, and he falls for the rest of them, only half making it to the bed before he crumples to the Hyur’s feet across it. “I-I’m so sorry,” he whimpers, the words cracking something garbled and pathetic along the way. And he struggles all the more to hear his voice break, because he’d thought he’d found a way to have this meeting, but he’s falling apart anyway. “I’m so sorry, I could have done so much, I  _ knew, I knew-” _

He’s interrupted by the sharp tug of his shirt dragging him wholly onto the bed, his own sharp noise of surprise as Raubahn pulls him over his legs, letting him scramble for his own balance with his tail whipping the air in a panicked sway. The next words are lost on the his mouth when he yanks him to a kiss.

It’s as if they’re  _ both _ surprised by it, they hold so still, until suddenly Raubahn tugs him even closer and opens his mouth to him, like they suddenly both understand something without speaking a thing.

Oh. He’s wanted this. He wanted this so badly, under the weight of that terror and guilt he’s let himself feel so intimately in the past months. He’s wanted this past thinking he deserves it- the warmth of Raubahn’s lips, the force of him holding him close, the solidity of him under his own palms. He sinks in, deepening the kiss as he wraps his arms around him, holds back the stutter of his own chest as the tears threaten to dismantle him entirely.

He gasps when they draw away, feeling the man nuzzle so close to him there’s a shared heat between them both. And Raubahn holds him still, fixing him for balance and closeness alike, presses his lips along Atlin’s nose, his temple, his neck, his ear. And he lingers there; Atlin can feel the brush of his skin against the sensitive flesh of the tufts of his airs. “I’ve waited too long for that,” he whispers. “So don’t you apologize.”

“I-”

“E’tahlin.” It’s sharp, raspy on the difficulty of speaking, and only more pronounced when he speaks so softly. “In my own folly, for all I’ve been weak, I only have so few things left in the world. You among them.”

It tickles his ear something hot and sends a jolt straight down his spine. “Oh, shite,” he squirms a little, blushing with his own vulgarity. Fuck. He holds himself over the general, balances there as he digs his nose to his shoulder, takes in every warm earthy breath of him. Only the light stings of his cuts and the leaden ache of his body can even remind him this is real at all. “Fuck. Why are you...”

Raubahn chuckles, heady and reverberating against him. “You’ve gotten quite eloquent in this age of time that’s passed between us.”

“Twelve,” he snaps, biting back his own blushing, his tears. “ _ Must _ you? You could have died. I thought every day that you could have-”

He can’t see Raubahn’s face, only hear him grunt against him as his fingers rake across the fabric of his shirt, tugging it ever higher to bare to the warm Thanalan air. “And do you think, E’tahlin, that I had word of the world beyond? Whether in those ages in the pit I could know in that damned silence and filth if you, too, were alive or dead?” His eyes narrow and he coughs, to his own shoulder. “Ilberd took great pleasure in toying with me and telling me time and again that you had died. Or were in fact alive. In so many different ways, until over the weeks I knew naught of what the truth could have been.”

Atlin stills. “I-” he shudders, pressing back against Raubahn’s embrace to lean over him. He hadn’t thought of that- it comes like a fresh stab of guilt. What all could have happened, that hellish stretch of time in that darkness to know only what he’d lost and not what he’d had left- how could he have not thought of that? “Shite.”

“There’s the eloquence again,” the Hyur laughs, weakly.

He blushes, reaches then. He traces his skin, his ears, his hair beneath his hands, reminds himself over and over- he’s here. And he silently balances himself as Raubahn reaches with a hand to do the same, running across the base of his tail, the nape of his back, his shoulderblades and neck. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so bloody, fucking sorry.”

“No.” Raubahn shakes his head, thumbing away the tracks of tears across his face. He feels weak; no armor, no visor, nothing but his own damn skin and the disgusting look of him reddened and swollen with tears. “No. I’ve failed my sultana, and that’s not something you could have helped,” he says. “I’ve lost my city once and once again. But you remain. And don’t apologize for that.” He smiles, eyes softening to a soft gaze that could kill him.

He shakes his head. “But you’re here. You’re really here.” He sobs through his own grin, leaning into that touch. “You’re alive. I’ve- I’ve needed to be forgiven. I don’t care if you don’t think I’ve done wrong. If you’re too fucking  _ good  _ to think I’ve done wrong. I need…” There’s the swipe of his hand again, taking away those tears like  _ he’s  _ the one who needs to be cared for. “Gods be fucked, you’re here, and I-” he stutters. “Just- I- I  _ love _ you, you bastard.  _ I love you. _ ”

The rapt pause hangs in the air, striking him like an axe with the implications of his own words, striking him with the knowing Raubahn knows the weight of them too.

“Gods,” the man breathes, eyes widening. Atlin can see the twitch of the smile on his face- until it consumes him with a full, aching grin. “You certainly took long enough to get that out.”

He can feel how hard he’s flustered now, how his heart is just pounding in his throat. There’s nothing- gods, there’s not a reply in any of the hells for that, because he  _ has  _ taken long enough. For something he’s known damn well, too.

Desperately he leans in then, before Raubahn can say another thing, kisses him like he could drag him into himself, drag them both away from every damned thing in this world.

*

They gather their strength both in the quarters safe below the stones in the Waking Sands, soaking in the every revelation and twist of truth since crammed into their understanding of the world. The sultana lives, says the Prioress; just the fact alone lets Atlin see just a bit more life spark into the frame of the general.

The general, who’d held him each excruciating night since as the pain of his arm consumed him in the hours, as his bones and skin negotiated the idea of recovery- true, assisted recovery. Of a broken absence never to be made whole- rebalancing, habits to break, pain to weather. It’s flighty, the pain- and so subtle only Atlin and Pipin even learn to register the tightness in his jaw when it sets in, learn to ebb with it.

But the unrest gathers, percolates in the air, in the word about, ready to break like he knows it will.

When the word of the Dravanians is relayed, then, it’s all he can do but to muster a sardonic smile and know his role in the Ul’dahn investigations is cut short for now. But Raubahn is alive. Raubahn is growing the look of life in him by the day. And Raubahn tells him he forgives him enough times in whispers in the black shrouds of night that maybe he’ll just one day believe he deserves it, won’t feel the gauntness of his lover’s body like a lump in his throat.

He understands the look in Allegrezza’s eyes when the news is relayed. He’s not been ignorant to the restlessness in the Roegadyn since they even settled in the Waking Sands over the last two days; at meetings she fidgets with the glistening rings of her fingers, glancing about the room, to the door. More than understand, he can even respect it.

Hells, in the world they live in, she’s been more than astute to take her own love and hold him close in the inimitable bonds of marriage.

So he can sense it in the air when she hears of the call back to Ishgard, even if she stops herself, draws it all back in to look to him like he should be offended by her eagerness, or something. He could think of plenty of petty disasters or errands he’d love to plague the Scions in Thanalan to keep him here, as surely she has for Ishgard.

And gods, she’s so newly wed, the ring  _ still  _ catches him when it glistens with that luster at the corner of his eye. Her hair is only just freshly dyed in streaks of the Fortemps colors.

“Why don’t you and Alphinaud ride ahead?” he suggests, when the Scions all are dispersed around them and the hall’s to them alone. “I can be the needy bastard that stays behind for a day. Let me look the overenthusiastic shirker instead of you looking overeager.” Gods, it almost sounds like he’s doing her a  _ favor _ when he wants this just as much as she does.

His sister’s shoulders visibly sag, eyes glancing about even though he’s spoken in a perfectly discreet whisper. He doesn’t blame her the paranoia, either. Not when he’s sprinted through a pit of poison knowing full well that it’d been constructed with full knowledge that he’d run straight into it without a second thought. For people like them, the world will only ever hold their lovers against them as weaknesses. “You only just…” she trails off, eyes darting to the commons, where they both know Raubahn sits with his son.

It’s strange still. He thinks, in a sense, Allegrezza’s grown a reflex of being tactful about him and Raubahn. Months of not wanting to press him, fear of rubbing salt in the wounds as she had time with her own amour. Months of him crumbling into himself at the very mention of the general with no true news to ameliorate it.

“A day or two is a lot to ask when the world finds a new disaster for the Warriors of Light every other one,” he says, and finds it in himself easier then to grin. Because it’s true. And it hurts, but somehow a day or two is enough to quell some of the pain. It has to be. “I’ll be there ere long.”

She nods, takes him to a quick hug that he returns with a little grin he can’t help. It’s like a breath of relief between them both, then. Go already, he thinks. You deserve this much. Allegrezza gives him a small, quietly excited smile when she draws away. He doesn’t miss the slightly quickened tempo of her feet when she moves to gather her effects to go.

When he turns, he isn’t even surprised to find Raubahn leaning in the doorway to watch him. He can’t help but shift on his feet, half self-conscious of his gaze, half too happy to see him to care.

“You’re putting off your duties,” Raubahn observes.

He can’t tell if he disapproves or not. “I don’t think so,” he says with an unbidden smile. “I’ve plenty to do.”

A raised eyebrow, a faint smile. “Is that so?”

“Aye.” He nods before he can stop himself. “I’ve seen how you’ve been eyeing the swords laid about here, General. You only have to ask me.”

He shifts in the doorway, something strange in his eyes as he paces to close the distance between them, runs the back of his fingers so lightly across Atlin’s brow anyone else could almost miss it. It’s a language they both know well from long before any of this ever happened- the touches of almost-affection, the passing brushing of skin. He can register the trepidation in Raubahn’s eyes now that he sees him closer.

Of course he wants to hold a sword, Atlin thinks ruefully. What ever  _ could  _ keep this man from the battle?

But Raubahn probably wonders the same of him.

“You know,” he says, patting that hand quickly enough before leaning to the wall, feigning thoughtfulness, “my combat style is an entire art of balance and battledance. I could… well, I could be a fine tutor yet.” It feels like daring for them to speak so lightly, like he’s tempting the fates to bring it all crashing down around him then, steal away the small foundling of hope he’s built away in the two days they’ve had.

The jest earns him a soft snort of amused disbelief, which is more than enough for his efforts.

They both know now, well enough, that the battle of their own minds is as an inexplicable open wound than the ever-present concerns of Eorzea will ever be. For his cheer about Atlin, Raubahn still looks in quiet moments like he struggles to smile, weighted with thought of the sultana, of Ul’dah, of the future.

No, it makes his stomach jump every moment he can wrench a grin from the Flame General. And Atlin still catches himself waking in the middle of the night gasping, needing to reach like a desperate child in the dark to find the man and know he’s still there.

At least, he supposes, for all the floundering they’re desperate to balance each other out at every turn. Like another single tip of chaos in the fray could break them both.

*

Over passing of the precious days, he strangles his reservations and urges in the crib. He takes every word and touch Raubahn gives him like it’s the last. Because it could be. Now, that truth hits him like a dull blade, lacking all the sharpness of its tang in all those months. He can fear that bluntness alone, fear the idea that he could ever be complacent.

He’s been complacent before.

But he shoves it all down and drinks in the size, touch, smell, the  _ taste  _ of Raubahn around him when they lay together at night. They don’t make love- he’s too loathe to hurt him for anything past heavy petting, the occasional rutting when they’re both too sleepy to think to stop.

But he knows in those moments that the man’s awake- the pain keeps him awake, and he won’t take anything Atlin offers him- that they’re laid there together. Tangled in the sphere of their own thoughts, skin to skin, their private world taken back in drags and scrabbles from everything else.

Slowly being put back together.

*

At some point, two days into in the restrained step by step of their swordplay, Raubahn shoves his daggers to the side so quickly he can feel his breath seize, feel that primal flash of fear when someone the size of him swipes so close.

At some point they speed up- until Atlin finds his own agility can be torn off its entire rhythm by a single, well-balanced blow across the brow.

His visor clatters in a skid across the cliff stones, a sharp seabreeze slapping his temple as he feels his face bared to the air, skids back and barely rebalances with a dagger dug into the ground. He gasps, the surprise and pleasure hitting him both as he looks back up and finds Raubahn breathing as heavily in turn. Beneath the perfunctory armor they’ve scrabbled together, the general’s knees are trembling only so much; Atlin doesn’t remark on it. The entire dynamic shift of fighting with one arm is something Raubahn’s taking with a remarkable grace past the pain he  _ knows  _ he sees in the grit of his teeth.

This, he thinks, is just among so many of the reasons he never will deserve this man.

“Look at that,” he pants mildly, tipping his head to the visor, not daring to keep his eyes off the Bull of Ala Mhigo. “You’ve surprised the Godkiller.”

Raubahn’s only paused to look him over, see if he’s hurt him. His chest is heaving with the exertion, but that look is unmistakable, and fierce. “Is that it, then?”

Is it? Atlin can almost feel himself assessing the man in turn, his wounds, the shift of his body with a new center of gravity. Even going as slow and deliberate as they can, he’s taken off-guard by the direction and angle of the blows. And distracted, irrevocably, with his eyes on the tightly-bound stump, watching at every turn for the first sight of fresh blood.

This cliff they’ve kept to themselves, a single sunlit place they’ve sought out to keep Raubahn’s every stumble between the two of them, the every push and drag of them across the battledance their brand new secret. “I think I can get a little more out of you,” he says, decisively rising to stance, daggers gripped in hand.

So maybe, just maybe he lets Raubahn knock the first knife out of his hand, or lock the one in his left between the hilts until he’s breathlessly feeling the hard strain on his wrists, the gladiator’s sword slowly overpowering him until it slowly shudders to tap his shoulder.

“I yield,” he gasps. “You’ve bested me.”

The pressure alleviates almost instantly, Raubahn looking to him with a frown as he sheathes the sword and sets his hand to hip. “You let that happen. You’d never lock an off-hand knife to sword.”

“Maybe I did,” Atlin admits. They’re both still standing here, panting, open-mouthed, pushed hard enough for the day, the wind whispering a chilly breeze between both of them over the lingering dusk. “I’ve a night left,” he says, glancing away to that traitor, the sun, working to regulate the hard beat of his own overexcited heart. “Maybe I don’t want you to wear me out. Ishgard needs two Warriors of Light after all.”

“Aye, it certainly does.”

He feels the surprised noise escape him when he feels Raubahn touch his chin and turn him back, lean down to kiss him. And he lets him.

No, no, he thinks. Atlin’s only been  _ so _ restrained all these days, in the nights, tiptoeing to not press the man, determined not to kiss past the point of no return, not to do much more than pet and grope and just  _ hold  _ each other. It’s been all he could do to sneak off when it’s all gotten too much to be by himself and work it off alone.

But now they’re  _ already  _ panting and breathless, and Raubahn is reaching for his waist to drag him even further in.

This kiss is salty with their own sweat. He’d bring himself to be disgusted if it weren’t Raubahn, but it slips his mind within moments as he feels their tongues slide briefly, testing, the nibble of his own teeth drawing a shudder from his lover’s grip around him.

His dagger gives a sharp clamor as it falls, and he all but lets him press him back, rebalancing, back again until the cliffside rocks dig the linen of his shirt into his shoulderblades.

But they can only do so much in the broad light of the sunset- and he realizes almost too late. “We don’t have anything out here,” he whispers, a little stunned that he can even stop himself. “We should… go.”

Raubahn’s hand squeezes his perfunctorily, kisses him quickly again as he steps away. “Aye.”

 

It’s not easy, this walk back to the Waking Sands.

It brings his body to a needy ache that resonates in his stomach as they try not to sprint homeward. It hangs over them as they put away their gear, as he ushers him stiffly to their room and minds his bandages, strips away the sweat-soaked clothes of them both, draws a bath to clean them both.

Or tries to. There’s a lot of kissing in between the every task.

He finds himself pressed forward to the rim of the bath, Raubahn’s body folded over his, the bareness of their skin too comforting for him to want anything else, the ache of need coming back twofold as they grind together, as he twists to kiss his lips hungrily in their dance.

He’s been ready for this for too long, too scared to ever ask. He holds his breath, slowly, slowly rolls back to take him into himself, too sensitive, too full, too much at once too suddenly even if they’re going breath by breath, millimeter by millimeter until he’s sunk himself entirely to feel him inside.

“A-ah,” he can hear his own voice, resounding against the stone of the room around them. He can hear that needy keen of his in his ears as he settles, shifts to test the feeling of his shaft inside him, cramming him so deeply like this.

But heavens has it been a long time.

Raubahn returns the noise with a strained grunt above him, leaning in closer until he can feel the man’s back flattening against his, the every still dripping surface of him envelope him. It’s a comforting warmth, a pressure that holds him down at every point but his hips, and his hands, resting to wrap over Raubahn’s arm, lock them both together.

He moves, slowly fucking himself on his shaft, soaking in the every grunt of assent Raubahn deigns to give him, hot in his ear, sending them pointed with overstimulated attention as he gyrates. “Gods,” he whispers. Raubahn’s every breath is sending lightning down his body straight to his cock, to the point that he can’t help but reach and stroke himself as he moves, hears the obscene rhythm of them both as their skin meets, slaps and sucks away again.

“Gods indeed,” Raubahn says, so close he keens with the touch of his lips to his ear, “I don’t know how you…” a shudder, “always… do this.”

He laughs in spite of himself, moans in the next breath as Raubahn shifts and thrusts a little deeper into him, until they’re both moving together, closing the distance at every reach, forcing him a little further into senselessness.

“Shite, I missed… I missed this. I missed  _ you _ ,” he says, in spite of how strange the words are on his tongue. How strange it is to be completely open and just fucking admit it. “I missed you so, ah... bloody... much,” he groans, squeezing his eyes shut as Raubahn kisses the crook of his neck, fucks him a little faster.

This is too strong, he thinks, gasping. Like he’s pressing to an invisible breaking point, like a high he could have not ever even brushed before.

He’d stayed sober all this time to closely feel the every bruise. Feel every single day so acutely that he would not forget that every moment he’d breathed air freely in Ishgard Raubahn could not.

He’s sober now, and feeling himself slowly wrecked on the shore of the man, because if there’s anything he hasn’t felt this strongly before it’s him inside him, like this, like now.

Atlin feels his own peak burn through him just from the sensation of Raubahn shuddering to come, strokes himself to the point of aching to the rhythm of him twitching, hot bursts of come dragging across his insides until he’s breathless, open-mouthed and grounded only by the pressure of Raubahn’s body, the tickle of his breath against his neck, pressing kisses until they’re both too spent to do anything but collapse together.

 

They lay together in bed in the wake of it, and he bites back a comment at how, this time, their penance goes both ways. There was a struggle now to clean each other, hold each other- Raubahn treats him like he always has, like some kind of glass treasure, and he in turn takes the care to tend him, bind him with fresh bandages, lay him down in their bed and count every next dreadful hour to the sunrise.

He finds himself playing his fingers across the slightly raised points of the man’s tattoos, navigating him in the darkness they share. When they’re like this, he can almost let himself imagine they are anywhere. Raubahn’s quarters in the palaces of Ul’dah, perhaps, or somewhere peaceful, secluded, like Gridania, or the beaches of La Noscea. Ishgard, even.

Ishgard.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts, even though he already knows what Raubahn will say to it.

“...You have naught to be sorry for, and I’m growing weary of hearing it.” His voice is thick with the approach of sleep. Good, Atlin thinks. Perhaps he doesn’t hurt as much tonight. He shifts, turning to slip his arm under him and tug him a little closer, until they’re a tangle of his tail, the sheets, their legs, their skin.

“Well, I’m… sorry to leave again,” he says. “Leaving us both to wonder over again if… If we’ll lose each other.” He gives a dim chuckle. Lose each other. It’s a phrase that unnerves him as much as it excites him.

There’s a long, drawn silence. He almost thinks Raubahn’s fallen asleep, when the man says, “I love you for leaving me.”

“What?”

The man gives a stirring little grunt, fingers spreading across his hips as he turns in to face him. “As I love you for coming back. As you came for me in Halatali.”

He bites his lip, feels his heart quicken. He’d  _ promised  _ he would come for him, that night in Ul’dah, voice scraped raw from screams and Raubahn’s blood still on his shirt. “And you don’t care that I… said we could lose each other? As if you’re… mine. And I’m yours.”

“Do you mind if I’m yours, E’tahlin?” his voice is laced with something strange, warm- tender, almost.

“I-” he blinks, a little surprised to hear the question turned back to him. “No.” Not at all, no matter how it scares him to think of it- someone like Raubahn,  _ his.  _ Trusting him like that.

“Then, no.” A short chuckle rises on the man’s chest and he pulls him closer. “Never.”

“Oh.” He can’t possibly think of sleep after that. Not when his heart is racing, and those words are turning over in his brain as he absentmindedly runs his fingers across Raubahn’s chest. He can’t sleep when suddenly he’s all too aware of the body of his lover, the pace of his slowly deepening descent to a slumber.

He can’t shake the strange, profound knowledge that after the days have passed and the chaos has died away just enough, they can lay together like this still, after being crippled, poisoned, beaten and left to rot. That Raubahn can see all he’s seen and still laugh as he can, so warm and deep. Can still sleep like this and trust him to be  _ his. _

Maybe, he thinks, maybe one day I can hope to come back to stay.

The hope seems so childish and complex all at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really, really weak for the 'accidental/desperate confession of love' trope and I'm sorry.


	6. carve your name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, last installment! I have written more since then, but it needs a lot of editing because Heavensward storyline, ya feel? But this chapter is nothing but gratuitous, happy sex and character development, because you guys deserve gratuitous happy sex.  
> Enjoy.

Among the thousand things he’s had to feel reconfigure and adjust in his unbalanced world, sharing a room with Atlin had not been one Raubahn had expected. Crawling out of Halatali, redressing the ragged tender flesh where his arm used to be, learning that Nanamo was indeed alive and Ul’dah scrabbling for its own stability- these were things Raubahn would negotiate, if haltingly and painfully and quietly in his own time. Prioress Dewlala had seen to it that he be relayed the reports of the Flames and Syndicate activity in the city since- four entire months of a city’s every heartbeat piled high upon the desk in his new quarters.

This all was familiar; words and occupation were almost welcome to his eyes after that hellish solitude in imprisonment, hearing only his own thoughts echoed back to him when Ilberd hadn’t deigned to visit (and only then to goad him to punch his knuckles raw on the bars between them).

But he didn’t expect Atlin to be among the new and strange.

Atlin Tarn, whose dark braided hair tumbles over his shoulders when his head snaps to look to him in errant moments, whose mismatched eyes study him through his visor in even the most restful moments. Atlin Tarn, who is so attentive and  _ present  _ Raubahn finds himself fascinated and studying the Miqo’te back in turn, counting the every hour and expectation to find him at last return to his smokescreens, preen on their bed with his pipe as he always did in his so oft-visited memories. But he never does.

“Forgive my surprise,” he starts, piercing the air of their last morning together. “But you’ve not had a smoke or drank past sensibility in all the days you’ve been here.”

His armor clicks a little, only half strapped on, and he stops rummaging through his travel pack, looks over to him.

They’ve had this room to themselves alone for the past, blessed four days. The remaining few Scions and their allies have silently understood it, allocated it to them and tactfully not spoken of it past; Raubahn’s found himself taking every moment to realign what he knows of the Miqo’te, the picture he’d painted to remember and survive in prison. He’s peering over his shoulder, dark warpaint streaking his exposed, striking eyes.

He’ll remember this all, this every detail, to paint another picture in his mind for every moment that will follow Atlin walking out that door. Some men, he thinks, detach further with every loss and strike and graze with death- but he’s found a wretched familiarity with being reminded of his own mortality. A fondness, even, to know how closely he grazes life in the face of death, how brightly Atlin shines in his vision even when poison can cling to the air around them.

Atlin pauses packing, turning around fully then and approaching to sit beside him at the bed, wordlessly learning in against his arm and giving a huff. “I stopped smoking in Ishgard,” he says, eyes fixing to the sandstone wall before them both.

“Ah.”  _ It’s made you different.  _ More intense? Closer? He can’t describe it; it’s not unpleasant, though. Nay, it’s not unpleasant in the least. “It’s as though I’ve gotten the chance to learn you all over again.” He allows himself to reach and stroke through the Miqo’te’s hair, brush his fingers through the tufts of his gilded ears and let the softness run against him. “What brought such a change?” It’s unflattering to think he could have never expected it of him, but he’d known Atlin for it so well his frequent intemperance was both a charm and bane.

He turns into his touch, giving him that tiny, relaxed purr he only rarely ever gives. “Will you forgive me if I say I’d rather not talk about it?”

“Aye, that’s to you,” he says, letting his hand rest across the undershirt Atlin’s put on to wear under what will be his vest, his overcoat. Dressing for Ishgard is leaving him to pluck up and strap on layers and layers of himself as he picks up around the room, leaving him now a half-dressed warrior. Raubahn leans in, breathes into his lover’s hair as he rests his head there, lets himself remember Atlin as this- calm, warm and solid against him.

“Well, would you like to,” Atllin breathes, twisting up to press his lips to Raubahn’s neck, grazing just above where his bandages constrict him, “ _ learn _ me a little more before I go?”

It’s just the right meld of soft and husky to let him know immediately what he means. He feels the guttural assent rise from deep in his own body, meld with the laughter already rippling there, and turns in to kiss him. What little more he can have of this young Scion, he will take. The love they’d made last night in the bath had exhausted him past what he knew could be exhausting, but it’d made him hungry.

Like the moment of finally emerging free, breathing the fresh air of open upperground, greedily taking in all the more just to know truer and truer that it was  _ there. _

The Miqo’te lets him pull him in closer, so small beneath even his one arm, one leg settling over his until he’s half in his lap, their mouths pressed in needful kissing. And when he reaches beneath Atlin’s belt, snapping it away to massage at his hardness beneath, the Miqo’te only moans a little deeper into his lips. Reaches for his own arousal, palm cupping it and stroking the blood heartbeat he knows he can feel against him.

It feels a challenge- how long they can remain, how much of Atlin he can push, how much Atlin can push back until either of them make another sound, give in. He’s ridden on the sound of his lover’s breathing, how it’s quickened with the pace of his hand, how he’s shuddered away to nuzzle to his shoulder instead now as they continue to stroke each other. Raubahn pictures him as he’d seen him so often before, bathed in the Ul’dahn sun, bare to him and teasing him with a salacious grin, and knows, just knows he’ll lose this game.

“Get on your knees on the bed,” he growls to Atlin’s ear, then, drawing away to stand and leaving the young Scion to mewl quietly in protest, lips flushed and parted.

He can see Atlin’s eyes, see how those slits have widened to dishes of arousal. “Is that how you want me?” he says with a lazy smile, though before Raubahn can say a thing he’s already turning over, elbows and knees settling across the sheets, boots just hanging off the edge as he presents himself, tail flicking with a sort of passive interest as he twists to look to him. “It’s been a long time since you had me like this.” His voice is so husky it jolts almost straight to his cock, and Atlin isn’t even undressed. “Come on, then,” he whispers, “Raubahn.”

He obeys, stirred by the sound of his own name when it’s said like that, slipping a hand down around Atlin’s torso and tugging him back, pressing his rump straight against his groin, grinding down into him so he can feel it, feel what he does to him. Atlin reaches then to struggle his pants and smallclothes down, letting Raubahn tug them all the way down to his knees, until his legs are tangled closed with his trousers snagged on his boots, unable to move any further.

He doesn’t care to bother to undress him past that- not when he’s presented, bare, opening pink and ready. Atlin is watching him from where he’s leaned into the sheets, mouth dug into the bed and eyes blinking once, twice. He won’t bother ruin the Scion’s clothes yet by ripping them in half to spread his legs. No, instead he lets his knees sit together there at the edge of the bed, breathlessly works to undress himself. It’s a stinging relief to release his cock from where it’s been straining against his trousers- Atlin isn’t subtle at all, either, about shifting back just enough to let it graze along his own arousal, his taint, his hole, ears flicking then with a playfulness.

He can just tell he’s smiling. “You should…” he breathes, voice muffled by the bed, “fuck me now, if you don’t mind.”

He shakes his head, biting away the urge to obey. No, instead he hastily draws to their bedside table, taking the corked bottle of oil they’ve set aside for this very purpose. It’s effort to pop the cork away with his thumb, but the urgency of it all all but breaks it, and Raubahn turns it over, letting it slick over his own fingers- there. He ignores the huff of complaint it earns him from Atlin for the delay- the Miqo’te will just have to deal.

“Do you mean to draw this out and make me late to- aaa _ aah _ -” The pitch of his voice swings up hard and fast as Raubahn lets his two fingers cram inside with one quick thrust of the wrist. Atlin tightens around him almost instantly, whines, “Oh gods, you’ve never been that fast before, that’s good- ah-” His back arches, tail flicking urgently as Raubahn finds the one spot inside him, the one he knows too well, loves too well to press if only for how Atlin will fall apart every time.

He works him open, taking thorough care to brush against that one ridge inside him hard and frequently, ignoring how his own cock hardens to a painful, pounding ache for all the messy shuddering and moaning he’s taking from the Miqo’te mouth. “Fuck, fuck-” Atlin’s next string of curses are lost in the sheets, the linens tugging up around his mouth as he bites into them, moans and begins to move even up against his fingers, gasps when he adds another, until he’s slick, tight and so, so hot inside Raubahn can barely help himself. “Raubahn,  _ fuck _ ,” he snaps, eyes dazed with a need as he slows, lets his knuckles settle against the entrance of him, “if you make me come like this alone, I’ll…” he trails off, panting. “...You’re not allowed to let me be the only one.”

He says it so sternly he can almost be taken aback. It’s easy to forget who they both are when they’re just together like this.

“Please,” the Miqo’te whispers, softly then. “Please, can we? I can’t take this much longer, and I  _ want you _ .”

“...I don’t want to hurt you before you go to Ishgard,” he admits, hesitant. “Believe me, I want you.”

“I don’t  _ care,”  _ Atlin hisses. _ “ _ I can heal. I only get  _ you _ for so long.”

Raubahn can feel his mouth go dry with the strength of his tone, grits his teeth with how that needfulness goes straight to his groin. “If you… wish.” He says it, he thinks, like he’s not aching with the pounding of his own need to desperately press into his lover, feel him again for the last time in hells know how long it’ll be.

Atlin shudders softly as draws his fingers out, the obscene slicking noise following with a pop as they leave, trace along the base of his tail, the small of his back, his hip. Then, just before the Miqo’te can take another breath to speak again, he squeezes his waist and pulls him in, stroking his own cock briefly and gritting his teeth as he positions it just to touch against his entrance, slick precum gleaming all across Atlin’s thighs and back now.

The young Scion is dripping onto the sheets and making a mess of his armor now anyway. Neither of them know how to care- not when he can feel how Atlin’s body receives him, see how his back arches, muscles tightening and scars flexing across his tan skin as he presses inside, through the tightness, through the twitching.

“E’tahlin,” he whispers, groaning as his shaft sinks halfway through into him, “you feel… breathtaking.”

“So,” he pants, hands curling to fists in the bed, tugging it away from the corners, “do you.”

He pushes in the entire rest of the way in a single thrust then, drawing a harsh cry from Atlin that makes him almost want to draw away, stop. He sits there, aching, needing, burning as he listens to the ragged breaths and whimpers as the Miqo’te adjusts, desperately suppressing his own urge to just thrust and fuck into Atlin until he can’t walk.

“Please.” It’s so small he almost doesn’t hear it. “Please, please please please  _ please… _ ”

He’s so bloody  _ tight  _ with his legs together like this, presented to him so that Raubahn can map the every twist of his back as his body reacts to him pulling away, slowly feeling every inch of him stroke along his cock- and thrust in again. He growls, guttural, hand squeezing tight around the Miqo’te’s waist almost for support at this point.

There’s no way he’s going to last very long, not when the way Atlin is looking at him like that, with those dizzy eyes and those parted lips- is going straight to his cock, and the Miqo’te’s body is responding in kind.

“Fuck me hard,” he can hear Atlin beg softly, over the thundering of his own pleasure as he rolls to thrust into him slowly, “please. I want you to carve yourself into me,” he says, voice pitchy, breathy, staggered with every movement of their hips, “I want you to mark me so I remember you wherever I go.”

It’s all he can do not to take him until he breaks, for how he begs like this. With a growl of frustration, he leans in, wrapping his arm about Atlin’s chest and tugging his undershirt up until his fingers can brace against the soft nub of his nipple, drawing a surprised noise as he then draws him upward, braces his arm across the Miqo’te’s chest as he mounts him on his cock.

“Oh, oh  _ fuck, _ ” Atlin moans, as he feels himself settle even  _ deeper  _ inside him. The Miqo’te shudders, hands gripping his arm as he arches his head back against his broad chest, squirming helplessly with his cock so beautifully sidled in him.

Raubahn never felt like he’s possessed him anymore than this. Not when he’s open-mouthed and looking up to him like that, giving a hard aching twitch with every shiver around his cock, held up like this. He feels his cock flex, hard, consuming- hells, he could come just looking at him like this.

“I-” He pants, drawing back, thrusting upward against and feeling Atlin’s entire body twist in a visceral response. “E’tahlin, seven hells,” he curses.

The Miqo’te shuts his eyes, softly gritting his teeth and mewling as he shifts on his knees against the bed, wiggles him a little further in. “Raubahn,” he returns. “I-”

The words are lost when he begins- the careful, precise process of fucking him, drawing more and more heat from him, drawing a silent scream on Atlin’s mouth as he arches even closer into his chest, hands holding on to his arm for dear life as he moves.

The Miqo’te is sobbing by the time he watches the string of his come spurt over the bedsheets, feels him squirm even harder against his arm as he rolls the soft flesh of his nipple over his thumb, doesn’t stop fucking him, doesn’t stop taking because Atlin doesn’t stop his garbled begging.

He flexes and squeezes Atlin so tight he can hear the Miqo’te gasp as he feels the heat rise too hard, like a storm strike as he comes, spurts deep into him, lost in the Scion’s desperate, “Oh, gods, hells,  _ Raubahn,  _ I love you, fuck, I  _ love you-” _

Gods, he feels the last bit of him ripped out by those words, moans himself in spite of his all as he feels Atlin take every last part of him inside.

It’s half gentle, half exhausted when he lets him go at last, feels him crumple forward onto the sheets a disheveled mess, the sweet heat of him still clinging as he stays inside him, feels his own seed stirring in his body.

It’s strikingly intimate, he thinks. To claim him like this. Atlin doesn’t make a sound as he draws out, aching, lightheaded from the height of it, and slowly falls to bed beside him. He reaches to run his hand across his shoulders. “Are you all-”

He’s interrupted by a sharp, but weak, laugh. “Yes. I am.” The Miqo’te slumps a bit, rolls to lay on his back and gaze to him, lips tugged to a guarded smile. “Is this how you say you love me back? Asking that?”

He frowns, propping himself up well as he can as he studies him. “I  _ do _ love you,” he says.

Atlin’s,  _ E’tahlin’s,  _ smile freezes, something reaching his eyes that Raubahn knows too well. The tension, the reservation, the withdrawing almost as if the Miqo’te’s consumed by a shame, or fear. “I-” the smile strains, cracks, and he aches to see the beginnings of fresh tears glistening wet against his lover’s eyelashes, a bright red crawling up his cheeks. “Oh, shite.” Atlin looks away, then, rubbing away at his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t why that...” he groans through his fingers. “Shite. I’m trying. I’ve never done this before.”

_ That  _ he could tell, if only for how Atlin had dealt with their conversation the night before, his lover’s hesitation to even ask what Raubahn knew well as the sky was blue.

Atlin runs his hand down his face and frowns, glaring to the ceiling as if it’s offended him somehow. “You’re too damn patient, you know that, General?”

“Not in all things,” he confesses with a chuckle.  _ Not with most things. _

As his arousal tapers out, he can already feel the ache return to cry across his every muscle, sense the look of them both, half-dressed and laid in disarray on their tangled sheets. It’s a new mess to love, and soon to say farewell to.

Raubahn leans in to kiss him briefly across the temple, and he can feel him watch him again, unknown thoughts running through Atlin’s mind as he lays there chewing away at his lips. The Miqo’te starts, haltingly, “I have to…”

He lays back, then, knows already what they both need to say on the script. They’ve done it enough in Ul’dah, rushing their moments in private in between appointments and meetings and missions.

They’ll do it many times more, hopefully. “Aye,” he says, giving the Miqo’te’s waist a single squeeze before he tugs his shirt down for him. He watches as Atlin crawls out of bed then, chewing on his lip the entire way as he composes himself, wincing, swiping to clean up quickly by the washbasin before moving to the rest of his armor, ready and waiting by his travel pack and the splay of his few belongings.

In turn, Raubahn struggles upward, aching with the warring reflexes of his past body and the accommodations of his new one to balance and redress himself, move slowly, catch Atlin glancing to him again through the corner of his eye as the Miqo’te works his own armor at a practiced pace.

He’s worrying, he realizes, with a stab of soft alarm. How could he not have realized all before that Atlin was  _ concerned? _ It’s such a- he exhales, turns to meet his eyes, catch him in the act. He could grin, suddenly understanding him all the more.

Atlin freezes, blinking half-leant over fastening his gauntlets, hair still a clumsy mess as he looks back. And he smiles- weakly. “What, can’t I look at you before I go?”

He crosses the room, ignoring the tense draw of Atlin’s shoulders as he approaches, passes him.

Wordlessly, Raubahn picks up the ropes and daggers and potions and belts strewn across their desk, across from his own missives, and begins to pack them. Armor, packing, even  _ doors _ are a startling new challenge now, he thinks. Even something as simple as sitting up or holding Atlin to him becomes an entirely new reflex and feeling.

But they both have to try to settle into it.

Atlin is quiet for a long moment after, like he’s watching him still. And then, he returns to his armor, strapping up perfunctorily until the plates click soft and tightly-fastened at every point, the jagged steel points of him brushing him in time with his tail as he turns, runs his gloved hands down Raubahn’s back.

“I’m not looking at you all the time because I pity you, or something,” he says, quietly. “I want you to know that.”

He can’t help but smile. “I know.”  _ It’s because you’re concerned.  _ He can’t imagine the anger and the misery alike he’d know if Atlin were ever to look at him with pity; like he could give up on him. The respect of this man, he thinks, past the sultana’s life and Ul’dah, is something to fight for and treasure.

He reaches across the desk, then. “You’re missing this,” he says, fingers brushing across the ebony metal of the man’s visor, sitting gleaming in the light beneath his hand. It’s etched with scratches, meticulously polished for Atlin’s painstaking sense of beauty, and as familiar a part of Atlin’s face now as his tattoos, his eyes. The Miqo’te holds still, the brilliant golds and blues of those eyes not looking away as Raubahn slowly fixes the mask over his head, sets it close against his brow. “Even a hero needs his own measures to keep himself safe,” Raubahn says, and thinks, that could go for both of them.

Atlin just wraps both arms around him and presses into his chest. “You keep yourself safe, too,” he murmurs, words almost lost to the fabric of his shirt, “you and Pipin and the sultana and Prioress Dewlala and Yugiri and the rest, you put Ul’dah back together,” he says. “I’m going to come back, but until then, just… know…” He trails off, inhales long enough for Raubahn to understand the few unspoken words.

He wraps his broad arm across him, ignores the pang of pain searing in his severed bones across his shoulder, the weight of knowing what awaits them both. “I know,” he says. “I know, my love.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there we are. Thanks for sticking to it to this point, for leaving comments and kudos ^ ^ As always, let me know how you think. It may or may not be my birthday on the 17th so that'd make my day ; u ; Godspeed ya'll. Thank you for reading.


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